Solar System Model

On Sunday Hannah, Mummy and I made a 'scale model' of the solar system, at a scale of 1-to-6 billion.   We used the instruction from this link.   It was a lot of fun (at least for Dad).

First, we assembled objects to represent the sun and planets at their relative sizes.   A pink football for the Sun, a yellow pingpong ball for Jupiter, small peppercorns for the rocky planets like Earth etc

1. Sun- ball, diameter 8.00 inches
2. Mercury-a pinhead, diameter 0.03 inch
3. Venus-a peppercorn, diameter 0.08 inch
4. Earth-a second peppercorn
5. Mars-a second pinhead
6. Jupiter-a chestnut or a pecan, diameter 0.90 inch
7. Saturn-a hazelnut or an acorn, diameter 0.70 inch
8. Uranus-a peanut or coffeebean, diameter 0.30 inch
9. Neptune-a second peanut or coffeebean
10. Pluto- a third pinhead (or smaller, since Pluto is the smallest planet)

Then we went down to the long main path of Royal Ascot and placed our planets in their relative positions from the Sun:   Mercury 10 meters, Venus 19m, Earth 26m, Mars 40m etc.

Photo below:  The Sun from Earth.  The sun is the peppercorn in the foreground, and the Sun is the ball placed on a traffic cone just behind Rika in the left back-ground.

Bu the time we got to place-down Jupiter at 135m, we could hardly see our Sun in the glare of the real Sun.  Even with Rika sitting next to it ('god like')

Saturn (247m) and Uranus (500m) were placed down in second half of the main path, hidden from our Sun by a walkway,   In the photo below Hannah is standing by Saturn, and Jupiter is out of sight in the far background, 10m beyond the end of the visible part of this path.  

We put Uranus near the end of the path and found we didn't have enough room in Royal Ascot to place Neptune (800m) and Pluto (c. 1,000m).   Wow! the solar system sure is big!  and very, very  empty!