A Quick Tour The distance between Baltimore and Washington is roughly 60 km. Let’s make a new unit of measurement called a BW where, 1 BW = distance between Washington and Baltimore

Earth - Diameter about 13,000 km or 213 BW

Earth’s Moon – about 380,000 km away or 6,400 BW

The Inner Solar System (Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) – about 3 Astronomical Units (AU) or 450 million km across or 7.5 million BW

The Solar System out to Pluto’s orbit 80 AU or about 12 billion km across about 200 million BW

Nearest 25 stars enclose a region about 26 light years or 2.5 x km across 4 x BW = 4 trillion BW.

Our “neighborhood” within a spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy – a few kpc or about 9 x km about 1.5 x BW.

The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years or 30 kilo parsecs across. This is about 1.5 x BW.

The nearest galaxy similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy is the Andromeda Galaxy. It is 670 kpc or about 2 million light years away. This is 3.4 x BW. Our galaxy and Andromeda belong to a cluster of about 30 galaxies called the Local Group about 3 million light years across.

The Local Group is a member of the Local Supercluster about 30 mega parsecs or 100 million light years across.

The most distant object observed is a supernova explosion roughly 10 billion light years away or about 1 x BW.