Slice of the Sun

Wow, has it really been nearly a month since I posted last? Part of the reason for this is that the project I've got for this post took me quite a while a do. Two years ago, on a whim, I decided to create a scale model of the earth's interior for myself, and posted it. I got a lot of positive responses to it, and this month I decided to undertake a similar project I've had in mind for some time: doing the same thing, but with the sun.

When I first looked up the sun to do research for this project, I noticed the serendipitous fact that the sun's radius is about 109 times larger than the earth's. This immediately suggested that I decrease the scale by a hundred times, so that one pixel would represent one hundred kilometers instead of a single one. Once again, I've broken the image up into pieces so Blogger would accept them (you can paste them back together seamlessly if you want to), and written most of my commentary in the body of the image itself. Anyway, without further ado, here it is:

I hope you found that as interesting a trip as I did. I'm sorry it took so long for me to get this out there; I was actually all ready to release it over a week ago, only to discover that I'd accidentally used the sun's radius as its diameter and made the whole thing half as large as it should be. Expanding it and finding more facts to fill up all the new space took some time, but I think it's been worth it. Anyway, now that's finally done I can move on to some other projects I have in mind. A hui hou!