Scale

[staffop]

Before i got my first telescope a few weeks ago, one of the issues i had difficulty with was the sheer size of the solar system, the milky way and by extension the universe. I remember reading Bill Bryson's Short History when he talked about relative distance:

'(Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals—the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations—but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn’t just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it’s way beyond Jupiter—five times farther from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 percent as much sunlight as Jupiter. Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway).'

Ignoring the fact that this is based on relative planetary size as well, is there a map available which shows the relative distances of the planets from each other, ignoring the actual size of each object ?

I've found this, which is in it's own way amazing, but is still based on relative size:

http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/

[Cornelius Varley]

This one gives a better scale of things  http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/248275-seriously-awesome-solar-system-model/

[staffop]

Hurts my head, and this is just the SS!

[staffop]

How long would it take for a plane to circumnavigate the sun (just trying to understand scale a bit more)?

[Gazabone]

How long would it take for a plane to circumnavigate the sun (just trying to understand scale a bit more)?

Not sure about our sun but try searching YouTube for, "No you are not the centre of the Universe".

Try this for starters.

http://youtu.be/H2d7czQbeOk

There are a couple slightly shorter versions but a stunning bit of video and does give you how long it would take to fly around a star, just not our sun though. I won't say how long here, you'll have to watch the clip, I won't spoil the surprise. Happy viewing on a summers evening

[Bizibilder]

How long would it take for a plane to circumnavigate the sun (just trying to understand scale a bit more)?

The Suns circumference is 2 700 000 miles so an airliner travelling at 600 mph would take 4500 hours to fly round it - or 187 days - or 26 weeks - or 6 months.

[dick_dangerous]

Scale pictures of the solar system are hard to come by because the distances involved are... ho ho... astronomical.

There are some great scale models out there - there's one at the village of Otford in Kent: http://www.solarsystem.otford.info/

A popular science practical that I used as a trainee teacher is the "Fruit-bowl Solar System" where you represent planets with vaguely to scale fruit. On this scale Jupiter is a Grapefruit and Mercury a raisin (or similar). Since Pluto's relegation at least you don't have to start fiddling with the currants. You then space the children out across a playing field to give an idea of scale.

At an astronomy night at work I replicated this using our nature reserve - all the inner planets were right by the visitor's centre while places like Neptune were about 200 metres away. I then made a gag about walking to Russia in order to get an idea of how far away Alpha Centauri is, but on my scale, that's where you'd need to go. We're running the evening again in October and I'm hoping to use eggs of different sizes to represent the planets - I have model Aepornis egg to be Jupiter, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to locate a hummingbird egg for the right scale...

Paul