The world’s first scale model of the solar system

22.09.2015 09:00

A team of LA filmmakers has created the world's first scale model of the solar system in the Black Rock desert.

With the Earth the size of a marble, the model stretches out for seven miles on a dry lakebed in Nevada.

The project was captured in a short film, titled 'To Scale: The Solar System' by Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh.

'On a dry lakebed in Nevada, a group of friends build the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits: a true illustration of our place in the universe,' writes Overstreet.

The group of five friends wanted to present a more accurate view of the scale of our solar system from the one seen in educational posters and textbooks.

While these models present the relative size of each planet, the distances between them is wildly inaccurate.

'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,' Overstreet explains.

Based on Earth being the size of a half-inch marble, the team calculated the scale sizes of each orbit and planet, which were represented by balls and lightbulbs.

They then shot time-lapse images of their cars driving around the orbits over 36 hours from the vantage point of a nearby mountain.

In their scale model, Mercury, Venus and Earth are, respectively, 224 feet, 447 feet and 579 feet away from the sun.

Neptune is 3.5 miles away, Jupiter is 0.57 miles, Saturn is 1.1 mile and Uranus 2.1 miles.

In reality, the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun, while Neptune is 2.7 billion miles away.

'That's what I really wanted to try and capture. We are on a marble floating in the middle of nothing,' Overstreet says in the video. 'When you sort of come face-to-face with that, it's staggering.'

(dailymail.co.uk)

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