Someone may have already linked to it, but there’s one in a US college town someplace. Saw it on the Science Channel a couple years ago. Starts with the Sun, or rather just a portion of it, in the school’s gym. Then the planets are in various locations all to scale both in size and distance. I think only up to Earth is even on the campus. The rest are in various buildings in the town. And Pluto is a couple miles out of town…
That would be the Voyage scale model of the solar system. It was built on a 1-to-10-billion scale for both size and distance. The nearest star (Alpha Centauri) would be in California.
Here is a rather fascinating video that scrolls from Mercury all the way to VV Cephei, to give you an idea of the enormous scale of things. By the time VV Cephei rolls around you realize that the sun is practically microscopic beside it.
On the other hand Mars’ smaller moon would be a little over 0.0063".
Most of these models only have the Sun and the nine traditional planets, plus sometimes some of the larger moons. Anyone else think these models are incomplete unless they have Ceres, Eris, and Sedna and perhaps several other large TNOs?
Of course, then they would have to decide how to handle the distances to those objects that have highly eliptical orbits. Do they go with current position or the semi-major axes? If the former, the models expand by a factor of about 2.5, with Eris being the furthest at 97 AU. If the latter, then they expand by a factor of around 40, with Sedna’s semi-major axis of 525 AU.
Being an alum of Terminus Est’s school, I first thought of the Planet Walk as well. It’s a nice compromise between actually seeing the planets (which you can, though they’re very small), and being able to actually walk the solar system (which you can’t easily do with that one in Maine mentioned above.)
How would this change if the model also showed the planets’ orbits correctly, especially regarding the plane of the ecliptic? Would the ‘vertical’ offset be noticeable at the scale we’re discussing?
Here in Boston there’s a scale model of the solar system, with planets made of of brass! (And big enough to see and touch). The Sun is at the Hayden Planetarium in Science Park (Yes, New Yorkers, Boston has a Hayden, too), with models in the planetarium to show the size. But there are also models placed in the Boston area at their appropriately scaled distances. Mercury and Venus are in the museum itself, Earth is in a nearby hotel, Mars in the Cambridgeside Galleria mall, Saturn is in the Cambridge Public Library, Neptune is way out near me in the Saugus Square One Mall.
Here’s a page, with a picture of Saturn:
The University of Colorado at Boulder has an outdoor version that takes about 10 minutes to walk. The sun is the size of a grapefruit, while the earth is the size of a head of a pin. Here’s a link:
I recommend the one in Peoria, but it has a few bugs. They had to move the sun a while back and at least Jupiter and Uranus are off a bit. The inner planets are OK though. Pluto is in Good’s Furniture in Kewanee which is worth a visit by itself. It takes about a day to see all nine planets.
There’s a very nice one at 1:1 scale which I can recommend. Perhaps you’ve visited it?
Thank you! I knew there was another one I had seen when I was visiting grad schools, but I couldn’t remember where it was.
A brilliant notion that would totally confuse the hell out of everyone. My hat is off to you, sir.
Only the small blue-green planet about 150 million kilometers from the central body. The rest of it is kind of a wasteland, with few golf courses and fewer bars, and practically no jeweled beaches suitable for lounging to speak of. I understand Triton is quite nice, but cold, and Io is very smelly. Plus, the colors of Saturn’s rings just aren’t as vibrant as they are in the brochure. All in all, a rather disappointing system to visit, but it’s mostly harmless.
Stranger
As described by Prof. Jay M. Pasachoff of Williams College-Hopkins Observatory in Williamstown, Mass. in his book Astronomy; From the Earth to the Universe (Sauders College Publishing 1983), and paraphrased a bit here:
Imagine the Solar System is scaled down and placed on a map of the United States. The Sun is a hot ball of gas taking up all of Rockefeller Center, a kilometer wide, in the heart of Manhattan in New York City. Mercury, then, is a sphere four meters wide in mid-Long Island. Venus is a ball ten meters around, about one and a half times farther away. The Earth is only slightly bigger, located near Trenton, N.J., while Mars is half that size, five meters wide, located past Philadelphia, Pa.
Jupiter, the next planet out from the Sun, is a hundred meters across (about the size of a baseball stadium), past Pittsburgh on the Ohio border. Saturn, with its rings, is a little larger than Jupiter, and is beyond Cincinnati, toward the Indiana state line. Uranus and Neptune are each about thirty meters across, about the size of a baseball infield, and are near Topeka, Kans. and Santa Fe, N.M., respectively. Pluto, about the size of Mercury, is near Los Angeles, forty times the distance of the Earth from the Sun.
And occasionally, a comet sweeps in from Alaska…
Sweden has put together what is apparently the world’s biggest scale model solar system, installed at appropriate points throughout the country.
Conveniently, Stockholm has a spherical arena 360’ across, which serves nicely as a sun.
Earth is a two-foot globe in a museum about five miles away.
Pluto is a 6" sphere on a pedestal in a town 180 miles away.
A bit of exaggeration. Jupiter’s radius (71,492 km) is only about three times the size of Neptune’s (24,764 km). A dot on that scale would be very small but hardly microscopic.
Not to mention the asteroids.
I used to work across the street from the American Geophysical Union headquarters in Washington DC, which has a SS scale model set into the sidewalk at Florida Avenue and 20th Street NW.
Well, Ceres is still considered an asteroid, despite its recent “promotion” to dwarf planet[sup]1[/sup]. But they probably should have several others just to show that it’s not alone in the asteroid belt. Also they could have a Centaur[sup]2[/sup] or two to show that there are a few other things out there besides planets.
[sup]1[/sup] A singularly useless category, in my estimation, but this isn’t the forum to debate that.
[sup]2[/sup] Objects whose orbits lie completely within those of the outer planets. They originate in the Kuiper Belt, but have been perturbed into orbits further in. Eventually some will become short period comets.