In the history of my column, I've bombarded you with many numbers about the sizes and distances of the stars and planets in our Butler night sky.

The numbers can get so enormous that it's impossible to truly grasp their enormity. I still struggle with these figures and have been into amateur astronomy my entire life.

One way to get a mental handle on it is to scale down or miniaturize the universe so its size is a little easier to relate to. For example, you can do that with things around your house, and I especially like to go into my kitchen and use fruits, nuts and seasonings.

First, let's start with the solar system. Put an orange on the kitchen table and make that our sun. In reality, our sun is nearly 900 thousand miles in diameter, so we are really scaling down!

The Earth on that scale would be a single grain of salt from your saltshaker. The actual distance from Earth to the sun is about 93 million miles. That's so far that if you drove your car to the sun at 70 mph, it would take you a century and a half to get there. As you get closer and closer to our home star, you better pray your car's air conditioner is in good shape!

So, on our scale with the sun the size of an orange, where do you suppose you should place the salt grain-sized Earth?

Across the kitchen? The far end of the house? You must put it 30 feet away from the orange! That would mean it would have to be out in the front yard at my house. We're just getting started, though.

Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, is 88,000 miles in diameter. On our scale, that would be about the size of a chocolate-covered peanut. You would need to put it down the block from your house, about 200 feet away from the orange-sized sun.

Jupiter's actual distance from the sun is about 500 million miles. A trip in your car from Jupiter to the sun at 70 mph would take about 800 years, not including rest stops!

Saturn, the next planet out from Jupiter, would be about the size of a plain peanut about 400 feet away from our orange-sized sun.

Pluto, once considered the most distant planet from the sun and now demoted to a dwarf planet, would be the size of a speck of finely ground pepper about 10 blocks away.

By the way, the actual average distance of Pluto from the sun is over three and a half billion miles, and it would take you about 6,000 years to drive from Pluto to the sun at 70 mph.

Now, let's get stellar with our scale. One of the next closest stars to our sun is Alpha Centauri. It's about the same size as our sun, so you could represent it with another orange.

How far would the Alpha Centauri orange be from our sun orange? Time to blow your mind. It would have to be about 1,300 miles away! That's roughly the distance from St. Paul, Minn., to Charleston, S.C.

The actual distance to Alpha Centauri is about 25 trillion miles. Driving there at 70 mph would take you almost 41 million years.

So has your head exploded yet? If it hasn't, consider this.

Our Milky Way galaxy has at least a couple hundred billion other stars. On our scale, those stars would vary in size from prunes to giant pumpkins on steroids. Good luck getting all that produce together. If you could, you would need to space all your fruit stars about 2,000 miles apart in a circle approximately 20 million miles in diameter. I don't know about you, but my mind just exploded!

Oh, one more thing. Our Milky Way galaxy is just one of the billions and billions of other galaxies in our visible universe. Now, on our scale that would be ... oh forget about it.

Keep this brain-exploding mental exercise in mind the next time you're stargazing.

Celestial happenings:

This weekend the Lyrids meteor shower is peaking, especially Saturday night-Sunday morning, mainly after midnight. You may see 15 to 20 meteors an hour, and the best viewing will be in the dark countryside.

Along with that, the new crescent moon passes by the bright planet Venus and the Pleiades star cluster in the early evening western sky. The Pleiades, otherwise known as "The Seven Little Sisters, are over 400 light-years away, and one light-year equals nearly six trillion miles.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of "Stars: A Month by Month Tour of the Constellations," published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.