The Enormous Solar System
Filmmaker Wylie Overstreet and a group of friends built the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits on a dry lake bed in Nevada.
“Every picture of the solar system that we ever encounter is not to scale,” Overstreet says. “If you put the orbits to scale on a piece of paper, the planets become microscopic. The only way to see a scale model of the solar system is to build one.”
So they did, in Black Rock Desert, northern Nevada. Overstreet says that to create a scale model with a small marble depicting Earth, the group needed seven miles of complete empty space. Follow their project on this edition of To Scale.
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