Travel virtually to Mars

Hey you. Yourself, you who love to look at the sky and immerse yourself in endless thoughts about life, the universe and everything else. You who died laughing when you read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." You are a fan of "Star Wars" and are counting the days for the debut of the new "Star Trek". Yes, you.

You who are passionate about astronomy and imagine working at NASA every day will love what designer David Paliwoda created. We're talking about a super fun site that tries - and can - make us understand the universe a little more, in the metric sense of the thing.

Suddenly math classes make sense

Paliwoda calculated the distance between Earth and Mars in pixels, a very popular unit of measurement in internet times. But to create a nice comparative scale, kilometers are also used.

Think first that the earth measures 100 pixels and the moon 27, keeping 3, 000 pixels apart. "Fine, but what about Mars?" You ask. Well, Mars would measure, on this geeky scale, 53 pixels and be 428, 000 pixels away.

This pixel scale facilitates our understanding of distance, because this measurement here represents a huge value if we think that the ratio of the size of the earth is 100 (in pixel) to 12, 756 km. That is, each pixel represents 127 km. Pure math. It's hard to understand? So click here, go to the site, have fun and tell us what it was like to travel 7, 000 pixels per second.