Professional astronomical distance converter for space science and astronomy.
Distance light travels in one year: 9.461 × 10¹² km. Used for stellar distances.
Distance at which 1 AU subtends 1 arcsecond. 1 pc = 3.26 ly. Professional astronomy unit.
Average Earth-Sun distance: 149.6 million km. Solar system scale reference.
Million parsecs. Used for galactic and cosmological distances. 1 Mpc = 3.26 million ly.
Average distance to Moon. 1.28 light seconds. Closest celestial body.
149.6 million km. 8.3 light minutes. Defines astronomical unit.
Kuiper Belt extends to ~50 AU, Oort Cloud to ~100,000 AU.
Proxima Centauri. 1.3 parsecs. Closest star to our solar system.
Our galaxy spans about 30 kpc. Contains 100-400 billion stars.
Nearest major galaxy. 0.77 Mpc. Approaching for future collision.
Galaxy group containing Milky Way, Andromeda, and ~80 other galaxies.
Comoving distance to cosmic horizon. 14.3 Gpc diameter sphere.
Nearest star system. Triple star system with potentially habitable exoplanet.
Brightest star in night sky. Binary system with white dwarf companion.
Former and future pole star. Standard reference for magnitude scale.
Seven Sisters star cluster. Young hot blue stars in Taurus constellation.
Red supergiant in Orion. Potential supernova candidate.
Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole. 8 kpc from solar system.
Satellite galaxy of Milky Way. Southern hemisphere observation.
Most distant galaxies observed. Near the cosmic horizon.
Distance in parsecs = 1 / parallax in arcseconds. Foundation of cosmic distance ladder.
Atmospheric seeing limits ground telescopes to ~0.01" parallax precision.
ESA satellite measured parallaxes to 0.002" precision. 118,000 stars.
Current ESA mission. Microarcsecond precision for 1 billion stars.