Melbourne, Australia has one along shore of Port Phillip Bay, from St Kilda to Port Melbourne. 1 to 1billion scale.
Pretty big place. Always makes me appreciate that I can go several hundred times c in Elite: Dangerous when I have to supercruise out to some station a few hundred thousand lightseconds out from the system entry point.
i’m inclined to say it’s usually built like a flat solar system.
Not just flat, but also linear, with the Sun and all the planets aligned, instead of each in a different point of their orbits.
This is a great idea for a father/son home project. We’re doing it in fruit, and starting with an apple as a stand-in for earth. Now we just need a VW bug-sized pumpkin for the sun…
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Why are you still adding to it? ETA: I should say, why are you still revising it?
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This is very cool!
I wish they’d taken drone footage from above. It would be neat to see if the naked eye could pick up the elliptical shape of Earth’s orbit, which varies by about 1/30th the total orbital radius between perihelion (closest approach) and aphelion.
For reference, one easy way to remember distances in the inner Solar system is with multiples.
The Moon’s average orbital radius is approximately 9 times the circumference of the Earth or about 30 times the Earth’s diameter.
The Sun is a little under 400 times as far away as the Moon. Because the Sun’s diameter is also just over 400 times larger than that of the moon, at that distance the Moon can just cover the Sun as seen from Earth, hence total solar eclipses.
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See, science is COOL!
I still remember seeing Prof Brian Cox explaining the retrograde motion of Mars on TV, with just three rocks and a stick of charcoal. “Oh, NOW I get it…”
Love that guy.
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Every now and then, they are aligned, so valid “snapshot”.
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