The distances to celestial objects is staggering. Trying to get a feel for the scale of things, just by listing the distances in kilometers or light years, is so far outside our daily experience on Earth as to be virtually useless. Even the distance of the Moon, at 400,000km, seems difficult to appreciate.
Scale models are helpful to comprehend the distance to the moon, sun, planets and stars.
The separation of the Earth and Moon are depicted to scale relative to their sizes in the bar below. On this scale, the Moon would be a speck of dust a little less than a tenth of a millimeter across, and it would be about 1 cm away. Pause for a moment and remind yourself that it took Apollo astronauts a few days to travel that distance. The Moon, left, and Earth, right The Earth and Moon as seen by the Galileo spacecraft. The moon is far in the background.