Cody’s Lab builds a solar system. A pea-sized Sun puts Pluto 97 feet away. The closest star, Proxima Centauri, would be 125 miles away.
Wowza.
No matter how carefully you pursue “to scale”, you’re stuck with the disclaimer “Distances between plantets not to scale.”
I think you’re underestimating the sizes involved.
We made one for Cub Scouts in the parking lot (drew chalk planets), at a scale of 10 million miles to the foot.
What that meant in practical terms is that Jupiter was 46 feet (give or take) from “the Sun”, Earth was about 9 feet away, Mercury was 3.5 feet away, Mars was a little over 13 and a half feet away. Saturn was almost 86 feet away, Uranus was almost 173 feet away, and Neptune was about 270 feet away.
So even if you shrank it down to something like 1/2" = 10,000,000 miles, you’ll still end up with Neptune over 11 feet away, and Mercury only being about 1.75" from the Sun.
And the planets will be TINY at that scale.
I’ve done this exercise, which uses an 8 inch ball for the sun, and a peppercorn (0.08 inch) for the earth. It is a cool experience, and needs to be done “live” rather than just reading about it. It really, really gives you a feeling for the vastness of space, and the fact that most of it is just empty.
Space […] is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is . I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.” - Adams
Adding text to pass the post filter.
The discussion of the huge distances between planets is interesting, but a number of posters seem to have overlooked that OP is aware of this:
Even at that, the relative sizes of the planets is not easily modeled. Here are some of the scale models from the Anchorage Planet Walk (a nifty thing where the planets and distances are scaled such that a normal walking pace is equivalent to the speed of light- “Earth” is about an 8 minute walk from “the Sun”. ):
That yellow thing in the picture is a scale Sun.
There’s a scale Mercury (a few inches above the “e” in Mercury) Up close, it’s maybe dime-sized.
I left my 1:1 scale model of the solar system around here somewhere. Maybe you’ve seen it?
I’ve seen your seashell collection, too. (some of it.) Very nice.
Why not just make them out of clay? I’ve got a pretty precise scale for measuring out small amounts. Make lumps of clay into balls. Paint them if you really want to get fancy. Total cost is probably $10. I’m not sure how you’d make Saturn’s rings but a paper disk would probably work well enough.
Nah. I can’t see the forest for the trees.
I’ve seen parts of it.