Solar Systems

The deadline for my University work passed without a hitch on Friday, leaving me absolutely knackered but ultimately happy that I’d completed everything on time without compromising on effort or quality too much. Seeing as I now have no deadlines for the immediate future, I might as well showcase what some of my work!

I had a mild interest in Astronomy from a young age, when we covered the planets in Primary School. It complimented my obsession with Star Wars and Warhammer 40,000 quite well I suppose.
It was as I discovered the Skeptical movement and community on the Internet a few years ago that my interest in Astronomy was rekindled (I recommend Bad Astronomy and APOD).
Carl Sagan’s Eulogy on the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ nearly reduced me to tears with its poetry and ideas when I first read it. It got me thinking about how we perceive ourselves in the universe, and how insipid and false it seemed for most religions and people to think that Humanity was the centre of the Universe when we’re all but invisible from within our solar system.

So here is my take on the ‘Pale Blue Dot’. It is a book that hopefully makes the mind-bogglingly huge distances involved with astronomy more tangible to most people.









It is essentially a scale model of the solar system, from the Sun all the way to Pluto, contained within a foldout book. Shrinking down the Sun to about the size of a grapefruit (about 100mm) using this website, gave me a scale of 1mm=13919km. At this scale all the planets are (just about!) visible and give a total length of approximately 328 metres. I had to construct a box to hold the amount of paper used in its creation, it’s a hefty pile!









Each line is a continuous path to each of the planets. Most of the distance within the book is taken up by the outer planets, with all the inner planets squeezed into the first 16 metres of the book. In the picture below, my friend in purple is where Mars is and each clip on the floor next to the paper marks Mercury, Venus and Earth respectively.
Our own beautiful little planet is barely a millimetre dot of blue, the whole of Humanity encapsulated within a millimetre…






I included Pluto, despite its recent re-classification as a ‘Plutoid’, for old time’s sake and because most people are familiar with it as a planet. If I remake and refine this book I’d probably also include other Plutoids within our Solar System (Ceres, the Asteroid belt, etc) for the sake of completeness and education. Also, because of Pluto’s eccentric orbit, I decided to try and figure out it’s near exact distance from the sun as of this year. With the help of a friend who knows Astrophysics, we worked out that it’s currently about half an AU past Neptune. (Is this right? I’m still unsure on this and would welcome any more information on this for future reference!)

Anyway I hope this makes people think about the scale of our vast universe and our place within it.
This whole idea of communicating large numbers by using visual methods seems to be an emergent theme in my latest pieces of work, as you’ll see in the next project I’ll post about.
Any feedback would be much appreciated!