I got a heads up from Chris Jones from space-facts.com about this image he’d made of the 8 major planets in our solar system.
All the planets to scale. Isn’t that a brilliant graphic? It really gives you a good sense of how large they are compared to each other.
And actually, if you like that, you should really have a glance over the rest of space-facts.com too. It’s full of lovely stuff!
I read somewhere–I believe it was in Bill Bryson’s A Short History Of Nearly Everything–that making a truly scale model of the solar system is impossible.
I wouldn’t say impossible, but certainly impractical. My own attempt is here – but to be truly to scale, the distances between the planets would have needed to be several times as big as they are in that image.
I played around the idea and worked out that were you to have an image 2,000 pixels tall representing the distance between the Sun and Pluto the Sun would be 5 pixels across and nothing else would be visible which makes for a bit of a dull image.
I think I reached the same conclusion actually. Though I have a couple of ideas on how to make it work… Whether or not they will remains to be seen, however.
It has been done, but its not exactly what could be called practical.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_Space_Walk
Impractical, perhaps. But that is so cool…
Oh yes. It gets bonus points for getting to say “I’ve just walked from Mars to Neptune”
Great graphics. Thanks for sharing.
No problem! :)