The mind-blowing scale of The Milky Way

This is a journey into the scale of the galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, our home in the vast cosmos we call the Universe.

If you'd like to support my ongoing project to make educational films about the Universe like this one do please check out my Patreon here:

/ epicspaceman

I post behind the scenes footage as I make the next video and also put Patrons in the video as astronuat avatars! I hope to make these videos full time in the future so all the support is massively appreciated.

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I love the Milky Way, this crazy, giant whirlpool of stars that’s our home. And I remember being blown away learning that the cloudy line in the sky was something we’re actually inside, something that really confused me at first. So this video is really my attempt to bring a little more appreciation and clarity to our oasis in the Universe. Making it has really helped me get to grips with some of the scale of things and I might well do another shorter video showing the size and location of some other things in the Milky Way on the ‘US’ scale. I also tried to address that existential dread that can creep in when getting to grips with the scale of things like this. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, our galaxy makes a long walk down to the chemist’s look like peanuts so I’ve tried to temper that with a quick reminder of the scale of the really small stuff. I do personally like to remind myself that I’m actually huge when the cosmos gets a little too big for its boots and starts melting my brain.

For some quick background on me, I started teaching myself VFX in 2021 so I could make these passion projects in my spare time and have been chipping away since. They may take months/years to make but I'm hoping to get faster as I can dedicate more time going forward.

Also finally for any quantum physicists out there, I know it’s a little sacrilegious to give a crude size and shape to a point particle like an electron. I tried to give some caveats there but ultimately I was trying to convey that the quantum world is just as small (in fact smaller) than humans are compared with galaxies. When I make a video about the quantum world I will do it better justice!