Understanding cosmological distances is quite beyond the realm of our everyday intuition and experience, but we can attempt to appreciate scales of distances in various ways. For astronomical distance scales, the NASA HEASARC (The High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center) has a a very nice applet to explore: the interactive distance scale.
There is another ruler designed by Cary Huang that is very clever: The 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 at a frontier.
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 should rather serve as a companion to help in understanding what was already presented.
