Light-years to Pixels (CSS) (ly to px)
1 light-year equals 3.575709155×10¹⁹ pixels (CSS) (rounded).
How to convert light-years to pixels (CSS)
To convert light-years to pixels (CSS), multiply the number of light-years by 3.575709155×10¹⁹. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply pixels (CSS) by 2.79664804×10⁻²⁰ (rounded).
pixels (CSS) = light-years × 3.575709155×10¹⁹
Example: 10 light-years = 3.575709155×10²⁰ pixels (CSS).
About these units
Light-year (ly)
The distance light travels in one Julian year: exactly 9,460,730,472,580,800 meters (about 9.46 trillion km).
Despite the name, a light-year measures distance rather than time, and its coinage is a little later than most people assume. Friedrich Bessel measured the distance to the star 61 Cygni in 1838 but did not use the unit himself. The light-year appeared in print in 1851, in a German article by Otto Ule, who explained its odd use of a time word by comparing it to saying that a place is an hour's walk away.
The International Astronomical Union defines it as the distance light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year of 365.25 days, about 9.46 trillion kilometers. NIST lists it as 9.460 73 times 10 to the 15th meters. Light-years dominate popular science, while professional astronomers mostly prefer the parsec, about 3.26 light-years. For scale, Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, is about 4.24 light-years away, and the Milky Way is roughly 100,000 light-years across.
1 light-year = 9.460730473×10¹⁵ meters (approximately).
Sources: Wikipedia: Light-year; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors
Pixel (CSS) (px)
The CSS reference pixel, defined as 1/96 of an inch. Physical screens vary, but browsers use this value to convert pixels to print units.
Pixel is a contraction of picture element, itself built from pix, a 1930s shortening of pictures. The idea is older than the word: Paul Nipkow's 1888 German patent spoke of a Bildpunkt, or picture point, and the phrase picture element appears in US patents filed as early as 1911. Frederic C. Billingsley of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory published pixel in 1965, writing about scanned images from space probes to the Moon and Mars, and said he had learned it from Keith E. McFarland, who reported it was already in use around 1963.
A pixel in a photograph is a sample, not a fixed length, and screens vary widely in size. CSS therefore defines px as an abstract reference pixel of exactly 1/96 inch, based on the visual angle of one pixel on a 96 dpi device held at arm's length. The CSS specification gives that angle as about 0.0213 degrees for a nominal arm's length of 28 inches, which works out to about 0.26 mm. On sharper screens a single CSS pixel spans several device pixels. Earlier CSS versions did not fix the ratio, but too much existing content assumed 96 dpi.
1 pixel (CSS) = 0.0002645833333 meters (approximately).
Sources: W3C: CSS Values and Units Module Level 3, absolute lengths; Wikipedia: Pixel
Related conversions
- Pixels (CSS) to light-years (reverse)
- Light-years to meters
- Light-years to kilometers
- Light-years to centimeters
- Light-years to millimeters
- Light-years to inches
- Light-years to feet
- Light-years to yards
- Light-years to miles
- Light-years to micrometers
- Light-years to nanometers
- Light-years to nautical miles
- Meters to pixels (CSS)
- Kilometers to pixels (CSS)
- Centimeters to pixels (CSS)
- Millimeters to pixels (CSS)
- Inches to pixels (CSS)
- Feet to pixels (CSS)
- Yards to pixels (CSS)
- Miles to pixels (CSS)
- Micrometers to pixels (CSS)
- Nanometers to pixels (CSS)
- Nautical miles to pixels (CSS)
See all length units.