Sure, the Solar System is big, but it's probably a lot bigger than you think, thanks to textbook representations that squeeze all the planets and their orbits into one page. Even at the speed of light, it takes more than 40 minutes to get from the Sun to Jupiter (a journey you can experience in real-time here). And if you wanted to build a scale model of the Solar System, with the Earth represented as a marble, you'd need a work surface seven miles across. (That's scale of about 1 to 800 million.)
That's exactly what filmmakers Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh did. They placed a weather balloon in the middle of a dry lakebed in Nevada, and then drew orbits for all of the major planets in the sand. At this scale, Saturn is just over a mile from the Sun, and the furthest planet Neptune is 3.5 miles away. In the video below, watch the planets orbiting their scale Sun. That's not computer animation: the filmmakers mounted lights on vehicles and drove them around the orbits, and the images you see are timelapse photography of the actual scale model. Amazing.
Take a look at the skies this weekend, find a planet, and think about how far away they are. Have a great one -- we'll be back on Monday.
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