Ed Ranks Units of Measurement to the Moon

Behold the moon, foolish mortal!

The Moon is far away. Most people probably don't realize how far away it is. But sometimes it can be very helpful to provide a few different units of measurement to help someone really, really picture just how far away the Moon is.  Here we go!

10. 384,402 Kilometers - Ugh. The metric system?!?!  I'm American. I have no idea what this means.

9. 238,856 Miles - This is what I'm talking about above when I say people don't know how far away it is. I can say something is over 238,000 miles away, but most people still can't picture that. They need something that they can relate to, in order to better visualize just how long this is.

8. 1 Lunar Distance (LD) - That's right, there is a unit of distance in astronomy known as the LD, which is the distance from the Earth to the Moon. That's still not very helpful, is it? Quite the recursive answer.

7. 0.00257 Astronomical Units (AU) - An AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The moon is only 1/388.6 of an AU away from the Earth. Well that's not helpful either! This unit of measurement is way too large!

6. 240 Billion Stacked Pennies - This one has the opposite problem. This unit of measurement is too small.  Although, fun fact: in the past 100 years, nearly 500 billion pennies have been minted. That means we do have enough pennies to get to the moon. Twice.

5. 69,186 Nautical Leagues - Hahaha, this one is basically worthless too, but I'm ranking it pretty high because it's fun to measure things in nautical leagues like I'm Captain Ahab or something.

4. 1.282 Light-Seconds - Yes, light-seconds are a unit of distance, not a unit of time (aside: I don't know why everyone gave Han Solo so much shit for the "made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs" line. Sometimes time and distance measurements get all messed up and confusing like this). It's the distance it takes light to travel one second. So the same light that the moon sees, we see 1.282 seconds later. Is that helpful for you? Probably not.

3. 4,203,865 Football Fields - Yikes! Over four billion is a LOT of (U.S.) football fields away!

2. 30 Earths - The moon is so far away from the Earth that you could stick 30 additional earths side-by-side between the Earth and the Moon. That's not close at all.

1. 6 CVS Receipts - CVS receipts, man! Too long! Am I right or what?