# A little further

Source: https://artemf.dev/blog/a-little-further

Published: 2026-09-06

A scroll through our universe

An AIrcade experiment by Artem Frolov

## Big universe. Keep exploring.

A light-year is the distance light travels in one year: about 9.46 trillion kilometres. This journey compresses immense distances into a few scrolls. The illustrations are conceptual, not a map or a scale model.

[Read as Markdown](/blog/a-little-further.md)

Read the journey & sources

### Earth

Every place you have been. Everyone you have known. One small world, wrapped in a thin blue atmosphere. 12,742 km · mean diameter. Sunlight takes about 8 minutes to reach us. [NASA source ↗](https://science.nasa.gov/earth/facts/)

### Earth & Moon

Pull back and the Moon comes into view. That familiar light in our night sky is much further away than it feels. 384,400 km · average distance from Earth. About 30 Earths could fit across the distance between their centres. [NASA source ↗](https://science.nasa.gov/moon/facts/)

### Solar System

Earth becomes a point in a family of planets. Beyond Neptune, icy worlds lead out towards the distant Oort Cloud. 4.5 billion km · Sun to Neptune, approximately. One astronomical unit is about 150 million km: the Earth–Sun distance. [NASA source ↗](https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/solar-system-facts/)

### Milky Way

Our solar system lives in a spiral galaxy. Vast lanes of stars and dust curl around its bright central region. 100,000 light-years · approximate disk diameter. Our solar system takes about 230 million years to orbit the galaxy. [NASA source ↗](https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/solar-system-facts/)

### Local Group

The Milky Way, Andromeda and dozens of smaller galaxies form our Local Group, held together by gravity. 2.5 million light-years · distance to Andromeda. The light we see from Andromeda began its journey before modern humans existed. [NASA source ↗](https://science.nasa.gov/universe/galaxies/)

### Cosmic Web

Zoom out again. Galaxies gather in threads and walls around enormous cosmic voids. Like bubbles, traced in galaxies. 92 billion light-years · observable universe diameter, approximately. This view is a small, imagined patch of the cosmic web. The size of the whole universe is unknown. [NASA source ↗](https://science.nasa.gov/universe/galaxies/large-scale-structures/)

[NASA: the size of the observable universe ↗](https://www.nasa.gov/science-research/astrophysics/how-big-is-space-we-asked-a-nasa-expert-episode-61/)

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