Remember that Solar System school project you may have built when you were a kid? Remember how crammed together the planets orbiting the sun were? Well, you couldn’t have made it any other way – say, to actual scale – unless you had some seven miles of space at your disposal.
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But that’s exactly what Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh did. The duo figured out they needed at least seven miles of quiet space to actually build a proper Solar System model and they chose a desert for the project.
Overstreet and Gorosh went to Nevada where they built their Solar System to a scale of 1 astronomical unit (distance from Sun to Earth) of 176 meters. From there, they mapped the entire system all the way to Pluto, recording mesmerizing time-lapse video of the planets, their movement and their orbits respective to the sun.
Unsurprisingly, Earth is about as big as a marble. Looking from that marble in the dust through the lens of the camera at the model sun, you’ll see a star mockup that’s exactly of the same size as the real sun seen from Earth – this proves the math behind the project is right.
Called To Scale: The Solar System, the short video below will show you exactly how they did it.
