I made this for my kids, and it’s heavily inspired by Valentina D’Efilippo’s visualizations in Britannica’s Encyclopedia Infographica. It’s long on purpose, to really accentuate the hugeness of the distance. We view it by stretching it across three monitors. I split it up to share in the gallery format, but [here’s a copy of the full-width original](https://imgur.com/a/69JXss0).
Most of this was made in Excel using a scatterplot. The space probe series uses the error bar hack to make a lollipop, which I thought paired well with the concept of probes ‘moving away’ from the solar system. The arrangement of the categorical axis is merely aesthetic.
Sources:
Spacecraft distances come from Heavens Above, an astronomy website hosted by the German space contractor of the same name together with the German Aerospace Center: [https://www.heavens-above.com/SolarEscape.aspx](https://www.heavens-above.com/SolarEscape.aspx)
Let me know how I can improve this for future iterations or projects!
For one: this is awesome. Absolutely amazing work. I do have a question. My understanding was that there was some disagreement about whether or not voyager had actually “left” the solar system yet. This is largely based on the fact that it’s still debated where the edge of the solar system is, or even how to define it for that matter. What’s your take on this?
![[OC] Current distances of (expected) interstellar space probes from the Sun (long x-axis so I split it up into gallery view)](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/zz0sza6jl4id1-1080x1024.png)
2 comments
I made this for my kids, and it’s heavily inspired by Valentina D’Efilippo’s visualizations in Britannica’s Encyclopedia Infographica. It’s long on purpose, to really accentuate the hugeness of the distance. We view it by stretching it across three monitors. I split it up to share in the gallery format, but [here’s a copy of the full-width original](https://imgur.com/a/69JXss0).
Most of this was made in Excel using a scatterplot. The space probe series uses the error bar hack to make a lollipop, which I thought paired well with the concept of probes ‘moving away’ from the solar system. The arrangement of the categorical axis is merely aesthetic.
Sources:
Spacecraft distances come from Heavens Above, an astronomy website hosted by the German space contractor of the same name together with the German Aerospace Center: [https://www.heavens-above.com/SolarEscape.aspx](https://www.heavens-above.com/SolarEscape.aspx)
Planet distances come from NASA’s planetary factsheet: [https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/)
Dwarf planet distances also come from NASA, found in the Small-Body Database: [https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html](https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html)
Let me know how I can improve this for future iterations or projects!
For one: this is awesome. Absolutely amazing work. I do have a question. My understanding was that there was some disagreement about whether or not voyager had actually “left” the solar system yet. This is largely based on the fact that it’s still debated where the edge of the solar system is, or even how to define it for that matter. What’s your take on this?