Imagine that our entire Solar System was the size of a nano geocache.
The Sun is now a microscopic speck of dust, as are its planets, whose orbits are represented by the top of the nano. On this scale, the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy will be about the length of Africa.
The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with arms extending from the center like a pinwheel. Our solar system is in the Orion arm of the Milky Way. Our Sun is one of about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. And our galaxy is just one of roughly 100 billion in the visible universe.
How far away is the nearest star to our sun? In our model, Proxima Centauri (and any planets that might be around it) would be another nano placed approximately 161 meters away. This is the typical separation of stars in our part of the galaxy.
So how big is the universe? No one knows if the universe is infinitely large, or even if ours is the only universe that exists. And other parts of the universe, very far away, might be quite different from the universe closer to home. Have a look at the related webpage for a graphical representation of the scale of the universe.
Well that sets up the unfortunate potential for an awful lot of urban micros and so I thought I would redress the balance with this urban large.
Please use stealth to avoid this cache being muggled. It can take very large swag.