A proper scale model of the solar system

September 17, 2015 10:35 PM

All those beautiful illustrations of the solar system and planetary orbits we find in textbooks, and books about space aren't really to scale. If the orbits were to scale then most of the planets would be too small to see in the image. So two guys decided to build and film a proper scale model of the solar system, out in the desert.

They also shot a Making Of video, which explains a bit more about how they plotted and marked the planetary orbits.

posted by Joh (39 comments total)

Obligatory Douglas Adams.
posted by Dr Dracator at 11:36 PM on September 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

I have read several authors who complain about the disparity between the way the solar system is drawn and imagined , versus the way it is. But their assertion was always that a scale model would be practically impossible to achieve. So enormous kudos to these people for proving them so convincingly wrong. And lucky for them to have a suitable place for making the model within 600 miles. There are not so many of those.
posted by rongorongo at 11:50 PM on September 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Neato! The Museum of Science in Boston has a scale model, too. Pluto's at the Riverside Green Line station, just inside of Rte 128. But you can't really visualize it like this video does. Well done.

I wasn't aware of this, but many places have built scale models.
posted by not_on_display at 11:59 PM on September 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

That's an amazing video.

That said, rongorongo - I don't really think it's fair to dispute the statement that a scale model is "practically impossible" to achieve. I mean, in this case, it took them having 7 miles of empty space in order to be able to produce it; I would call that pretty darned impractical!

(I mean, sure, you can do a smaller scale model. But already, Mercury and Mars are pretty small in this model)
posted by vernondalhart at 12:14 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Great stuff. Sugarloaf State Park near where I live has a "PlanetWalk" which is a couple miles long. The first time I was out there, I only got as far as Neptune before I turned back (started too late). Pluto is waaaaay far.
posted by Standard Orange at 12:37 AM on September 18, 2015

There is also the Sweden Solar System. Not only are the distances in scale, but also the relative sizes of the planets.

The Sun is represented by the Globe Arena. Mercury is a 25cm ball placed about 3km away.
posted by three blind mice at 1:03 AM on September 18, 2015 [6 favorites]

I did this with my niece and nephew. The Sun was a four-inch foam ball in my brother-in-law's kitchen. Mercury, Venus, and Earth were out in the front hall. I had purchased precision glass and metal beads to get the sizes right. The outer planets were spread out in the neighborhood. Finally, we got in the car to drive out to Voyager II.
posted by Mapes at 1:18 AM on September 18, 2015 [6 favorites]

I don't really think it's fair to dispute the statement that a scale model is "practically impossible" to achieve.

There's a lot of scale models, ranging from small ones that fits in a park to country-wide ones, so apparently people like doing impossible things. I have a 1:1,000,000,000 model nearby (which seems to be roughly the scale they used), built along a mountain ridge (and it offers not just one Pluto but three, take that dwarf planet haters!). What's new with this one is that they plotted out the full orbits.
posted by effbot at 1:19 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

All I'm saying is that "practically impossible" is not a bad term. A model like this is anything but practical, particularly when you include the orbits as they did.
posted by vernondalhart at 1:25 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

There's the Somerset Space Walk, about twice as big as this one, with scale models of the planets placed along a canal
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:22 AM on September 18, 2015

[I think my understanding of "practically impossible" was mainly gleaned from Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything. Multiple lessons on this site have taught me to be entertained by, but not to really trust, Bryson. To be fair I think he was talking about drawing a scale model of the solar system - which would indeed require long arms.]
posted by rongorongo at 2:27 AM on September 18, 2015

They don't call it 'space' for nothing.
posted by Segundus at 3:46 AM on September 18, 2015

Boston has one that's spread across the entire city.
posted by sammyo at 4:22 AM on September 18, 2015

I get choked up every time I hear old astronauts talking.
posted by chavenet at 4:36 AM on September 18, 2015 [7 favorites]

No love for Pluto?
posted by Gelatin at 4:43 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

(But seriously, a great video. Their mention that there are only 24 people on Earth who have seen the full disc of the planet -- and the subtle point that they're all old men now -- is nearly as staggering as the solar system's scale.)
posted by Gelatin at 4:46 AM on September 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

Hey mapes, you wouldn't happen to have an order list from McMaster-Carr or somewhere for your ball bearing planet purchases, would you?
posted by rockindata at 4:49 AM on September 18, 2015

I have read several authors who complain about the disparity between the way the solar system is drawn and imagined , versus the way it is. But their assertion was always that a scale model would be practically impossible to achieve. So enormous kudos to these people for proving them so convincingly wrong.

I suspect said authors were referring to how one could accurately represent the solar system in print form. Unless you were printing the world's larges coffee table book, there really is no viable way to depict the system accurately in print, and not simply have sub-microscopic dots on the pages. Scale models are nothing new, so I'm also pretty sure the authors are aware of such things, too.

This is a cool project and video, though I was hoping for a more bird's eye view of the lighted marbles at night so as to truly get a feel for the distances. Like, maybe send a GoPro up on a drone?
posted by Thorzdad at 5:09 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

i remember doing this exercise in 2nd grade. we had painted a bunch of little styrofoam balls for planets and took them out to the soccer fields with some string. mercury was practically next to the sun while the kids who had pluto were waaaaaay out on the other end of the field next to the fence.

blew our little minds.
posted by indubitable at 5:22 AM on September 18, 2015

Yeah, I choked up. All of us and everything, so small and so far away.

But then they said Neptune was the edge of the solar system, so fuck those guys. (flips table over on behalf of Pluto)
posted by Sing Or Swim at 5:47 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh great lunchtime tears. Not only to scale, but gorgeous - the astronauts talking about Earth from afar always gets me. Here we are - alone. Even our closest neighbors are so far away.
posted by harujion at 5:47 AM on September 18, 2015

I suspect said authors were referring to how one could accurately represent the solar system in print form. Unless you were printing the world's largest coffee table book, there really is no viable way to depict the system accurately in print, and not simply have sub-microscopic dots on the pages.

Yes. Here's an extremely wide web page, at the scale where the Moon is one pixel in size: pixelspace_solarsystem.html

See the scroll bar at the bottom! Try scrolling with the mouse wheel from the Sun to Mercury. There's also shortcuts to each planet (including Pluto), by symbol, at the top. The left and right arrow symbols stop at each comment on the way.

Check out the scroll bar position when you get to Jupiter. There's a long, long way still to go.
posted by jjj606 at 5:52 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Their mention that there are only 24 people on Earth who have seen the full disc of the planet -- and the subtle point that they're all old men now -- is nearly as staggering as the solar system's scale.

Three of them got to go twice, which sort of seems really unfair to the rest of humanity, though I'll give Jim Lovell a pass.

When I see things that illustrate the distances involved in the solar system what really amazes me is that humans have sent things to these places. We've landed robots on Mars and dropped a thing on a moon of Saturn, we've landed stuff on Venus, we've sent people to the moon, we've flown spaceships past Neptune and beyond. We've hit the fucking bullseye over and over again. That's kind of amazing.
posted by bondcliff at 6:08 AM on September 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

There's a parallel, I think, to the way a generation sees the last veterans of a long ago war die off, except that in those cases there's an inevitability to it. As a kid, I never imagined I might live to see the passing of the last of the men to have ever walked on the moon.
posted by bonobothegreat at 6:30 AM on September 18, 2015

The saddest thing to me is that they'll all be dead before another human again walks on the Moon or Mars.
posted by bondcliff at 7:04 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

The saddest thing to me is that they'll all be dead before another human again walks on the Moon or Mars.

But but but Cutting Taxes!!!!!
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 7:07 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I’ve already seen scale models of the Solar System, so I rolled my eyes at the introduction, but that depiction was truly beautiful.
posted by Fongotskilernie at 7:15 AM on September 18, 2015

I was kind of hoping they'd do the dwarf planets- Ceres, Pluto, Eris, etc. Then I started to think logistics. Ignoring the fact that only Ceres is on the elliptic (watched with sound off at work- did they do the orbits by driving cars? If they did, they'd need a drone and some sort of tunneling device), the major axis of Pluto's orbit would be roughly 8 and a half miles (and that's taking the angle that Pluto orbits from the rest of the solar system), let alone the 20 miles and 44 degree tilt Eris requires (roughly 14 miles flat for the major axis). The Kupier Belt is weird. So I get why they left it out. Still would have been nice if they had just stuck a couple of points on the video to illustrate just how far out Kupier Belt objects are.

On the other hand, I am really happy to see this, as there are very few (for obvious reasons) representations that actually show orbital distance accurately.
posted by Hactar at 7:24 AM on September 18, 2015

the disparity between the way the solar system is drawn and imagined , versus the way it is.

I assumed this refers to the fact that if drawn to scale to fit on a page, the planets would appear as mere specks. And it's the planets that everybody wants to see.
posted by Camofrog at 7:26 AM on September 18, 2015

not_on_display: "I wasn't aware of this, but many places have built scale models."

Yep, we've got one in Peoria (which I think was the first attempt at a scale model), the planetarium dome is the sun and earth is a big bigger than a marble. School children can bike to all the inner planets without too much trouble, but if you want to go to Pluto it's about 30 miles. They do it as a bike ride/race/fundraiser once a year or two, to Pluto and back. (They also have "comets" all over the world ... if your hometown sends a deputation to Peoria for whatever reason, we will send you home with a comet that our team of scientists have determined would be located in your hometown if the sun were located in Peoria. Because, hey, why not. It's more interesting than a key to a city.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:32 AM on September 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

We have one of these in Elmhurst, too. Had a lot of fun last summer finding all the signs with my first grade daughter.
posted by lester at 7:36 AM on September 18, 2015

They also have "comets" all over the world ... if your hometown sends a deputation to Peoria for whatever reason, we will send you home with a comet that our team of scientists have determined would be located in your hometown if the sun were located in Peoria.

New life goal, sorted. Comets!!
posted by jetlagaddict at 7:39 AM on September 18, 2015

(My personal favorite is this model embedded in the sidewalk in DC, close to a massive niche decorated with a nebula.)
posted by jetlagaddict at 7:46 AM on September 18, 2015

I loved this (as did my daughter). As for Pluto, their orbit for Neptune had already made the distance seven miles and Pluto would have made it so much further, so I can imagine one of them saying, "Well, Tyson did say it wasn't a planet anymore and... ah, fuck it."
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 7:49 AM on September 18, 2015

I mean, in this case, it took them having 7 miles of empty space in order to be able to produce it; I would call that pretty darned impractical!

And that's just out to Neptune; they didn't try to include the dwarf planets or the Oort cloud, which would really be trying to get the whole solar system.
posted by nubs at 8:51 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I became intrigued by this idea when quite young, maybe about 12. I didn't try to tackle the scale of the planets themselves but did make what amounted to a kind of graph of the distances from the sun. I did it on sheets of loose leaf paper taped together end to end to form a long strip. The inner planets all fit on the first sheet and then there were lots and lots of blank pages until I got to Jupiter and Saturn. I don't recall if I went any further.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 9:41 AM on September 18, 2015

Rather clever of them to drop all references to Burning Man, so as not to distract from this really cool model they made. (The model happened before Burning Man in the same desert it is held, by avid burners.)
posted by fragmede at 11:10 AM on September 18, 2015

Their mention that there are only 24 people on Earth who have seen the full disc of the planet -- and the subtle point that they're all old men now -- is nearly as staggering as the solar system's scale.

The saddest thing to me is that they'll all be dead before another human again walks on the Moon or Mars.

Yep. Only 17 out of those 24 are still alive now, and the actuarial tables for those guys over the next decade or so are not pretty.
posted by freelanceastro at 12:00 PM on September 18, 2015

Are there still lingering questions about the moon that could be solved by visiting though? It seems that we've learned what we think we needed to learn and feel its a better use of money to go explore further.
posted by LizBoBiz at 2:18 PM on September 19, 2015