This coupled with the size of the largest stars is truly mind-boggling (much less the size of the universe or the size of a quark). It's amazing how we humans, as primitive as we are, can at least have an idea of the scale of the universe. All through pictures and ideas.
But there's a difference between being able to reason about the magnitude of a number theoretically, and actually visualizing such a distance in your mind, which I find incredibly hard to do.
11 miles radius at a resolution of one pixel's width. That's like visualizing an entire city, from close enough to distinguish cracks in the sidewalks.
Interesting, the diameter of the Earth is about 12,000 km. The distance to the Sun is about 150 million km. The Hydrogen atom is much "larger", in comparision.
If you really want a mindf-ck, check Avogadro's number (6.022 * 10^23), the number of atoms in 12 grams of C.
Edit: I might add that I learned the above from a chemistry course book. More sense of wonder than when I read about the Orion project; almost as when I learned where atoms heavier than Helium comes from.
