If you look up an image of the Earth and moon, you're gonna get a picture where they're quite close together. Something like that. But, in reality, the Earth and moon are that far apart. That is the Earth and the
moon to scale. Taking the same concept but for the solar system, every single picture of the solar system
that we ever encounter is not to scale. If you put the orbits to scale on a
piece of paper, the planets become microscopic, and you won't be able to see
them. There is literally not an image that adequately shows you what it
actually looks like from out there. The only way to see a scale model of the
solar system is to build one. Welcome to Black Rock Desert. This is Alex, I'm Wylie, he's going to be behind the camera, I'm gonna be probably making a lot of mistakes on camera... We have 36 hours to measure the distances, trace out the orbits, and set up a time lapse shot from up on top of a nearby mountain. To create a scale model with an Earth only as big as this marble, you need seven miles of empty space. So that's why we're here. Why did you guys come? I don't have a job... At this scale, the Sun is a meter and a half so about that big around... We are driving right now to Mercury, ... and we've arrived. Venus is the same size as Earth... I have the world in my pocket somewhere... And Earth. And this is Mars. Got a couple of robots rolling around on
that one. Once the time lapse is ready, we'll drive each orbit with a light, hopefully you'll be able to tell just
how big they really are. Onward to the outer planets. Jupiter Saturn That tiny light out there is our Sun,
just over a mile away. The Sun is way, way out there now. This is it, the edge of the solar system. Right now, it's about 7 a.m., we just woke up right before the Sun is about to rise... We are on Earth's orbit, Wylie is over there holding our Sun, cue the dramatic sunrise music. So if we've made our model correctly, your perspective from where Earth is on the model, will match your perspective from standing on the real Earth. So if you look back at the sun, you will see that the model sun and the real Sun are the exact same size. That's how you can tell that the proportions are correct. There are 24 people in the entire
history of the human species who have actually seen the full
circle of the Earth with their own eyes. News: "Following the breakfast the astronauts went to the suit room where they donned their space suits..." Cronkite: "This is Man's attempt to get to the moon..." Announcer: "We have liftoff..." In Earth orbit the horizon is just slightly curved. When you head on out to the moon, that horizon slowly curves around and upon itself, and all of a sudden you're lookin' at something that is very strange, but very very familiar... Astronaut: "Oh my god look at that picture over there..." "Wow is that pretty!" You can put your thumb up, and you can hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything that you've ever known. All behind your thumb. Not any bigger than that, way up there. It's really beautiful. I mean you can cry. That's what I really wanted to try and
capture. We are on a marble, floating in the middle of nothing. When you come face-to-face with that, it's staggering. Subtitles by the Amara.org community
That was really something, lovely video.
There actually is a picture that does the solar system to scale. It's called If the Moon were only 1 pixel.
It's pretty neat.
On a slightly larger scale, look at Sweden.
My favorite scale video is "Riding Light".... Where you take the perspective of an objects leaving the sun at the speed of light, heading outwards... all the while looking behind you.
https://vimeo.com/117815404
A year ago my son and I did a sidewalk-chalk scale model of our solar system.
Since I wasn't sure what scale would be appropriate, I made a spreadsheet with the sizes and distances of the bodies in the solar system, and set it up so that I could give it any scale I wanted and it would automatically give me the values for size and distances for each body at that scale.
It turns out 1:1,000,000,000 is about as small as you can go and still do it properly with sidewalk chalk. Any smaller and the planets get to small to see. Earth at that scale is less than 13 mm across.
We made a template for all the bodies out of a cardboard folder so that we wouldn't have to do any measuring on site, and I planned out the GPS coordinates that would put each body at the proper scale distance. We put the sun in our driveway. Mercury was 58 meters away. Earth was 100 meters beyond that.
I brought a tablet with a bunch of images of the various bodies loaded up so that my son could look at several photos before drawing each planet. Here is a link to that album.
Neptune, the farthest planet, was 4.5 km away, luckily within a few meters of our favorite grocery store so that we could motivate ourselves with a treat after walking the whole thing.
The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, at the scale we were doing, would have been more than 40,000 km away.
Mom picked us up at Neptune we didn't have to walk all the way home.
Link to my spreadsheet. The red cell is editable so you can enter whatever scale you like.
Space is crazy cool. Comparison of stars video - another video just to show the scale of space
I got goosebumps. That's crazy to think only 24 people have ever seen it.
I watched this after a bong rip and I must say. This video destroyed me
I'm not homesexual, but that dude was damn good looking.