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Maine Completes Largest To-Scale Solar System Model
Neophytus writes "The University of Maine has now almost completed its solar system model, to be unveiled officially on the June 14th at Westfield. The final planet, Uranus, will be set in place on the 13th. At forty miles from Pluto to The Sun and built to a scale of 1:93,000,000, it will be the largest three-dimensional scale model of the Solar System in North America."
...is located in Sweden.
Add Ceres and some asteroids, to communicate just how empty an asteroid belt really is compared to the pictures in books and the depictions in sf films.
They didn't put Mars on Mars Hill. Probably for good reason, but it would have appealed to me.
Then something to explain that the nearest star is about 65,000 miles away on the same scale.
Gosh, that looks like a fun project.
After spending a few miserable years in ithaca, ny and staring at the "commons" walk for many a boring afternoon, I think your memories are escaping you. Pluto, is actually at the science center (somewhere on the "main road" route 13).
Ithaca's "carl sagan" walk is probably smaller than maines actually.
In fact the map is available on the net, if you want to take a look..
-bloo
Looking at the Jupiter webpage, it appears that they got carried away with the paint job. The earlier layers of painted bands look more faithful to me, then somebody put a "tomato soup" coat on it, hiding the rather even banding that is found on the real thing. Plus, the real thing is mostly light-tan, not red. I have seen the real thing through small telescopes, and Nasa tends to increase the contrast and color of their photos to bring out detail. But even those photos don't have so much red. The Mars team had extra paint or something? :-)
Further, it appears the models are round, but the larger planets are noticably "flattened" due to centrifugal rotational force.
Table-ized A.I.