Space is truly awe inspiring - and amazingly empty. It's often hard for us to conceptualize both the immense size of planets, stars, and other bodies with the incredible amount of space between them.
To show the immense size, introduced me to a fantastic YouTube video compared planet and star sizes. The video does a great job of showing relative size - once you think you're at the largest size possible, another body comes along and knocks it out of the park!
All of those wonderfully huge (and woefully undersized) bodies are faaaaaaaaaaaaaar part. Check out this interactive scrolling game from Josh Worth (props to Steve Greenwood for linking me to this). If you can scroll the entire way, I commend you.
This background knowledge helps to fully appreciate the Pluto news as covered by the latest This Week in NASA video - check it out!
After a nearly decade-long journey, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft arrived at Pluto on July 14 - passing by at a mere 7,750 miles above the surface ... resulting in an absolutely breathtaking image - the closest ever of Pluto. Initial congratulations included a Twitter post from the White House ...