You are here (Milky Way relative to the universe)

When you see our position and size relative to the universe, you can easily understand why Douglas Adams thought showing people this information would be a good way of executing them. "The Toal Perspective Vortex" showed the condemned their placement and total insignificance relative to the entire universe.

http://earthsky.org/space/galaxy-universe-location



"The Milky Way galaxy is one of a few dozen galaxies known as the Local Group.

Astronomers have discovered that our Local Group is on the outskirts of a giant cluster of several thousand galaxies – which astronomers call the Virgo Cluster."

Another thing worth knowing about is the universe's 'cosmic web' image showing the entirety of the known universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Observable_Universe_with_Measurements_01.png



long load time for full-size. 800x600 above is sufficient.

"Visualization of the whole observable universe. The scale is such that the fine grains represent collections of large numbers of superclusters. The Virgo Supercluster – home of Milky Way – is marked at the center, but is too small to be seen."