File:Small Bodies (15416177797).png

I haven't been on hiatus; I've just been working on this. Fraser Cain approached me and said people like these size comparison pictures and that I should make one. I agreed and set out on my quest. I ventured into the PDS, tortured the Ferret¹, consulted Emily Lakdawalla's wonderfully helpful blog posts, got confused, got unconfused, and eventually ended up with the above result.

At original size, 1 pixel equals 10 meters, which is enough to comfortably fit the largest animal that ever lived in three pixels. That's resolved by astronomical standards. The overlaid grid marks create kilometer sized squares. Colorized text corresponds to object types. Green is for comets, yellow is for asteroids, and pink is for moons. White text is a grab bag of stuff.

The Burj Khalifa is the tallest² man-made structure in the world at this time at just under 830 m.

An Oasis Class Cruise Ship is currently the largest passenger ship in the world at 362 m in length. There are longer ships but they carry oil and cargo, not people. Which would you rather ride?

The Arecibo Observatory, made famous for being featured in the movie Contact, is the world's largest single-aperture telescope at 300 m in diameter. It is sometimes used to make radar observations of Earth-passing asteroids to determine their characteristics. Apropos, no?

The Great Pyramid of Giza is something that needs no introduction. The majestic structure stood at 146.5 m tall in ancient times and has a base 230.4 m wide.

A symbol of science and collaboration in a world of ideological strife, the ISS is 108.5 m wide and the largest man-made structure in space.

The largest animal to ever live, the blue whale, is approximately 30 m long when full grown. A small child could fit comfortably inside the whale's heart. Despite this, it's the smallest object featured.

Central Park turns out to be a nice thing to compare many small bodies to at exactly 4km long. That its length comes to a whole number in metric units amuses me given that people in the U.S. typically utilize imperial units.

Siding Spring C/2013 A1 made headlines recently by passing very close to Mars. Its nucleus turned out to be smaller than originally estimated. Recent estimates range from 700 m to less than 500 m. Of course, no pictures exist to detail the shape of the nucleus so I do not know what shape it is, only its approximate diameter.

25143 Itokawa is a diminutive asteroid at 535 m long but the Japanese space probe Hayabusa captured some great imagery of it in 2005 and even returned a sample from it in 2010.

Deimos is Mars's smaller moon. At 15 km at its largest dimension, it's the largest object in the picture. This image was captured by NASA's MRO.

19P/Borrelly is an 8 km long comet imaged in 2001 by Deep Space 1. The Wikipedia article is a bit lacking, unfortunately.

103P/Hartley is a picturesque comet imaged by Deep Impact with jets streaming away from it. It is about 2.2 km long³ and this image I pulled out of an archive because it appears to be almost perfectly sideways which makes it a lot easier for me to size it properly.

Dactyl here is listed as a moon, but it is actually a moon of an asteroid called 243 Ida. That seems funny but there are probably a lot of these things out there but they are quite small and distant and therefore it's difficult to detect them. It's about 1.6 km at its widest and this photo was captured by the Galileo spacecraft.

Smooth and round Methone is a tiny, 3 km wide Saturnian moon. Conspicuously, it's the only gravitationally rounded object in the picture. This image was captured by a very close pass by Cassini.

1620 Geographos is a near-Earth asteroid which approached close enough in 1994 for a radar study which allowed this generalized 3d model of the object to be created. It is 5.1 km long. Note that an actual photo of the asteroid would reveal much more detail.

The Rubber Ducky—er, 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko—is a very rough-looking comet with a spacecraft named Rosetta currently orbiting it and making history. Chury-Gery is 4.5 km long.

5535 Annefrank is a main-belt asteroid about 6.6 km long. This image was captured by Stardust.

2867 Šteins is another main-belt asteroid imaged by Rosetta while on its way to 67P. It is 6.7 km long and its shape has been described as like that of a cut diamond.

81P/Wild, a 5.5 km wide comet, was hazily but nicely imaged by NASA's Stardust spacecraft. The haziness was caused not by the comet but by contaminants on the craft's optical surfaces before it ever reached the comet.

9P/Tempel is a relatively smooth-looking comet about 7.6 km wide. Here it was imaged at varying resolution by the Deep Impact impactor as it was deliberately crashed into the comet. That's why parts are blurry and others are sharper.

Finally, at the bottom edge of the frame and at Fraser's request, the outline of the fictional Death Star rests. According to Wookieepedia, the first was 160 km in diameter. It's ridiculously large, isn't it? We're not going to be constructing a real one anytime soon.

Note: I did some significant processing to clean up several of the low resolution images and threw in a little illustration and human guess work on top. Here is a step-by-step process of the most extreme example of this guesswork. That was fun.

1. Just because you can click on a page you know contains 80,000 thumbnails doesn't mean you should or that it is a good idea.

2. The definition of "tallest" is sometimes debated.

3. Emily helped unconfuse me on that measurement. Her comets picture was the only reference for dimensions I could find.