IsThatABigNumber.com is about extending our number sense. We make comparisons that are (mostly) down-to-earth: populations of people and animals, national budgets, river lengths and so on.
But when we leave behind everyday experience and look at the kind of numbers you find in astronomy and in combinatorics, we come across vastly bigger numbers.
One strategy to grasp these numbers is to break them down into a series of levels, to see them as stupidly big aggregations of things that are themselves stupidly big aggregations of … Here are some good clips illustrating this:
From Atlas Obscura, a sampling of infographics from the 19th century. All with the aim in mind of putting information into a format where it can easily be understood and compared.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-stunning-early-infographics-and-maps-of-the-1800s
Gaia Sky lets you explore our galaxy, the Milky Way. Gaia Sky is a real-time, 3D, astronomy visualisation software that runs on Windows, Linux and macOS.
https://zah.uni-heidelberg.de/institutes/ari/gaia/outreach/gaiasky/
