The Universe Within - very cool flash image zooms from galaxy to atoms

[mouser]

http://micro.magnet....owersof10/index.html

View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.

from The Athanasius Kircher Society

[JavaJones]

Powers of Ten is one of my favorite educational videos of all time. Highly recommended. This is basically an interactive implementation of that, which is to say it's completely awesome.

The site this is on, Molecular Expressions, is a project of Florida State University and there is an unbelievable amount of cool stuff there. I discovered it quite a few years ago and have still yet to see it all. They just keep adding more! In particular the videos of cells in motion (and dividing, etc.) are highly recommend, along with the computer chip shots for the techies amongst us. You could get lost for years on that site.

- Oshyan

[JavaJones]

I found a new, more comprehensive and "slick" version recently which blew my mind yet again: http://primaxstudio....f/scale_of_universe/
What's particularly interesting about this one is that it includes some additional info (speculative, but still scientific and interesting) on both ends of the spectrum, large and small. It also includes lots of great examples at every level of scale.



- Oshyan

[mouser]

great find. 

[nudone]

That may be the best use of Flash I've ever seen. Mind boggling. Now, whoever makes the next version, make it capable of fullscreen and with nicer graphics and I think I will fall of my chair in amazement.

[JavaJones]

Agreed, full-screen would be a big improvement. Nicer imagery would also be great. I could imagine a Google Maps-like ability to choose between the "map" (illustration") view that it has now, and photo-based, like the original Powers of 10 or the one mouser originally linked to.

- Oshyan

[tomos]

wow,
very good!

[ewemoa]

Out of curiosity would ecaradec's swiffout work for this?

[ewemoa]

FWIW, the following sort of thing gave a kind of full-screen experience here:

• View the content in a browser that is supported by VideoCacheView (or use DownloadHelper for FF, etc.)
• Save the flash content appropriately - I ended up with a .swf file
• If not already running, start a browser with full-screen capability (e.g. via F11 in IE, FF)
• Drag the .swf file into said browser instance
• Invoke the full-screen capability

No ideas regarding the improved graphics -- if wearing glasses or contacts, try removing them?

[David1904]

One things puzzles me - the distance from earth to moon is given as 400,000 km and the distance from earth to sun as 1,400,000 km and worse still the distance from earth to Alpha Centauri is 1,000,000 km (even closer than the sun).
Have I totally misread something - or have other people seen this too?

[JavaJones]

Hmm, shows distance from Earth to Sun as 60,000,000 km and to Proxima Centauri as 400,000,000,000,000 km here. But it does show the distance of Mercury and of Earth to the sun being the same, 60,000,000 km, which can't be right. Odd that you saw other errors than I did?

- Oshyan

[rxantos]

Independent of errors.
Impressive use of flash. Very smooth transition.

Is this possible to do using HTML5 instead of flash?