About
I remember being in awe after seeing an image of our Sun next to VY Canis Majoris over a decade ago. Seeing the Sun next to something that couldn't even fit on my screen left me thinking about how I could share that feeling with others while packaging it up in a visually pleasing way that gave people a sense of scale and perspective. After seeing Josh Worth's "If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel", I got to work designing mockups and many years later, after much procrastination, "If the Sun were 1 Pixel" was born.
How big is a pixel?
With the Sun at 1 pixel, each pixel is about 1.4 million km. Earth would be less than a hundredth of a pixel wide, orbiting 107 pixels away. Stephenson 2-18 would be about 1,840 pixels across, wider than most laptop screens.
The numbers
Sizes and distances come from each star's Wikipedia article as of November 2026. The biggest stars are hard to pin down: they're far away, puffed up with no clear edge, and some pulse in and out. Estimates for the same star can disagree by hundreds of Suns, so treat the ones marked with ~ as ballpark figures.
| Star | Wider than the Sun | Light-years away |
|---|---|---|
| Sirius | 1.71× | 8.6 |
| Pollux | 8.97× | 34 |
| Aldebaran | 45.1× | 67 |
| Rigel | 74.1× | 850 |
| Deneb | ~117× | ~1,400 |
| Mu Cephei | ~762× | ~1,370 |
| UY Scuti | ~909× | 5,900 |
| VY Canis Majoris | ~1,420× | 3,800 |
| Stephenson 2-18 | ~1,840× | ~19,000 |
Credits
Inspired by Josh Worth's If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel, which scales the Moon down to 1 pixel and explores distance within our solar system using the browser as a medium.