Understanding cosmological distances is easily out of the realm of our everyday intuition and experience, but we can appreciate scales of distances in various regimes. For scales solely in the astronomical regime, the NASA HEASARC (The High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center) put out a very nice applet for Interactive distance scale.
There is another ruler on htwins.net designed by Cary Huang that is a brilliant Scale of Universe Interactive Ruler. This applet differs from the last in that it goes from the very smallest of scales to the largest of scales, which represent the two extremes where our current understanding of physics is more or less flushed out.
We encourage you all to play with these informative applets that will hopefully bring some context to your understanding of the cosmic distance scale! This section of the wiki is NOT introducing anything new to the ideas laid out by Professor Matilsky, but rather serves as a companion to help in understanding what was already presented.
