If you visited If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel, you may have wondered “How could he afford all those pixels?”
All that digital real-estate actually does have a price-tag in the form of web-hosting fees. Until recently, the site was hosted on a cheap, shared server with traffic limits, so the site was running slow and some visitors were seeing an error screen.
The other day, after an annoying outage, I decided to pony up for a better package that will hopefully keep the site from crapping out the next time people are wondering how far it is to Pluto or a billionaire with a rocket company decides to tell his two million friends about it.
If you found the site interesting or informative, please click the button below to make a donation and help offset the increased maintenance costs. Donations can be as small as $1 or, if you’re feeling rich, why not donate a $1 for each of the 1,700,080 pixels to Pluto?
I only donated a small amount, but I love little projects like this. I sincerely hope you get the side project of the year at the Net Awards, but there’s some stiff competition.
I’m actually preparing a talk that expands a little upon this concept and wondered if you’d be interested in allowing me to re-purpose the idea. If not that’s cool, but if so hit me up on email to discuss further.
I think the website is kind of messed up. The SUN part is overlapped with the corresponding text. Maybe the donate button fucked up the entire CSS. My life is ruined now, this website with its almighty precision was the only thing that kept me alive.
I’d like to donate with translating it from English to Danish. Would that be considerably helpful?
Regards,
Pyrros
Simply amazing Josh! thanks… you turned my long night of infinity into bright sunshine of hope and wonderment.
Mark from Mpls.
I have donated a modest donation, which I hope will enable the pictures of the other giant planets to show their ring systems. It’s not just Saturn has them, you know!
“You may think it;s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
All the best,
John.
It is very nice and you have now to make one “If the proton of a hydrogen atom were only 1 pixel”
Hey man. I really, really enjoyed this. Scrolling through every pixel of emptiness.This is amazing.
Shared on my Facebook page. I’ve been trying to think of a way of illustrating the enormous nothingness of everything for ages, Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” (my favourite book) does a great job in getting the idea across, but your project has trumped it, by combining both a comparison of the planet sizes to the sun and the distances between them at the same scale. Fabulous. Cannot believe you only have 7 comments. I’m just a poor boy, so I’ve only donated a UK pound, but hey, if a squillion more people do it, you will be a squiillionaire.
Curious if accuracy is maintained at different display resolutions, i.e. 1280×800, HD, UHD(4k), iMac Retina (5K)?
That trip to Pluto would be much faster if I bought a 27″ iMac Retina, think my wife will go for that rationale?
High-definition displays tend to up-sample web content, so when an element is specified as “1 pixel” it actually adds a few extra pixels when it renders. It happens in a uniform way, so the overall scale – the relative sizes and distance of things remain the same. I don’t see why your wife needs to know that though.
Hello, nice project of yours. Never have felt the fast size of empiteness in our solar system beforehand. By the way was it intended to have a couple of the phrases repeated? I’ve found them when arriving at Neptune and Pluto.
I enjoyed reveling in the great empty beyond!! What a fearful joy to behold. And then I jumped into “Why we’re probably aren’t alone” in existence. My brain, whilst inside my skull cave, pretty much exploded. I type to you with mush in my head, and love in my heart. Thank you so much for helping me to understand why I’m special and insignificant, and also for prying open a small crack in my close mindedness that we are utterly alone. Actually, on a genuine note–I found (and am finding) a lot of your topics hitting me in very relieving ways. So thank you. I’m super glad you’re alive. :)
Hi! I can help you with the translation from english to spanish as i’m a native speaker!
Brilliant Josh. Thoughtful commentary on the journey. Just donated.
Amazing! Reaching pluto makes me emotional
Am sharing your Moon pixel site with my email correspondents, plus donating a small amount. Agree with everything positive that everyone has said before me. Wish I had your mind.
Brilliant. I’ve been a big fan of Cosmic View (book), the Eames film ‘Powers of Ten’ and Wylie Overstreet’s vid, ‘To Scale: The Solar System’, which help to envision our place in the Universe.
Your version puts an emphasis on the ‘vast nothing’ which is the reality of space. Well done.
Thanks Bruce! Also a fan of those works – especially the Eames piece. Thanks for the donation as well.
thats was super crazy!! I spent 15 minutes scrolling through space and when my brother walked into my room staring at a tiny pixel on a black screen (Pluto) and crying, he said “Ok” and quietly closed the door. He is used to me. Anyway, thank you for creating the amazing project and god bless!
When I was at the beginning, I was just scrolling through and was sort of bored. When I reached the end, I just wished there was more beyond Pluto. I kept my computer open for a few weeks playing it at the speed of light. Just donated when I reached the end.
This site is amazing. I hope you got enough donations so you can continue your work.