An example of an analogy used in public science discourse,
"…we will be taking a direct image of our very nearest habitable zone exoplanet, so this is around Proxima Centauri, and to give you an idea of the complexity of the technology and what it needs to achieve, you are trying to find a very small planet that's quite faint, that's next to an extremely bright star. It's the equivalent of trying to take a photograph of a firefly next to the beam of a light house, standing on a ship twenty kilometres away."
Dr Jayne Birkby
Dr Jayne Birkby (Associate Professor of Exoplanetary Sciences at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow in Physics at Brasenose College), was talking on an episode ('The Habitability of Planets') of 'In Our Time'.
Read examples of scientific analogies
Many examples of science analogies are listed in 'Creative comparisons: Making science familiar through language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts'. Free Download.
n.b., as the exoplanet is only reflecting light from its star, the comparison could be with a non-luminous fly rather than a firefly.
