A group of friends have built the first scale model of our solar system in the expanse of the vast Nevada desert.
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A video of the huge (but shrunken) solar system has attracted more than 400,000 views since it was posted on the To Scale Series Facebook page.
“If you put the orbits to scale on a piece of paper, the planets become microscopic”, Overstreet says in the clip.
“There is literally not an image that adequately shows you what it actually looks like from out there [space],” Overstreet noted.
To do this the two went out to a dry lake in Nevada and created a scale model of the solar system with a single astronomical unit equaling 176 meters. With a marble-size Earth, the sun is about 4 1/12 feet in diameter.
Wiley Overstreet and Alex Gorosh, with the help of a few friends, measured precise distances using Global Positioning System coordinates, traced orbits and set up a time-lapse video from atop a mountain – all within 36 hours.
What the project really gets at is just how important scale is. Sure, you can’t print it out or keep it on your desk, but it’s a novel idea and does a fantastic job of putting our Solar System into perspective.
We know what you’re thinking.
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“We are in a marble, floating in nothing”, he says in the short film, “when you sort of come face to face with that, it’s staggering”.
