Regular readers of this blog know that I love a good scale bar. As a longtime devotee of the works of Edward Tufte, I find great joy in visual representations of quantitative data. On various Fridays here in The Scholarly Kitchen we’ve looked at ways to understand the size of everything from the entire universe to the quantum realm. Today, something in between — perhaps the universe is too large for you to grasp, so how about a look at our galaxy? As noted below, if the Milky Way was the size of the continental United States, the sun would be about the size of a red blood cell, and the earth about one-third the size of the coronavirus. And as with all good videos discussing the stars, it ends with a Carl Sagan quote!

David Crotty

David Crotty

David Crotty is a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. Previously, David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.

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