Our Astronomy Course FINAL PROJECT
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Two of my kids and a friend, who also homeschools, recently took an online Kids Astronomy course. They (OK, we) learned a great deal, spent a lot of time looking at the heavens, and one very cold April day finishing their final project with the help of two moms, one dad, and a friendly volunteer (who got more than he bargained for when he stopped in for coffee, LOL!... and who successfully avoided the camera, I might add).
OUR INTREPID CREW
Back row - Lydia, Pam, Marcy, Annie
front - Madeline and Ian
Have you ever stopped to think about how much... well... SPACE there is in outer space? Let me tell you, we got a good idea of it with this Scale Model Solar System project. Unfortunately, we also had to do a bit of a rush job due to uncooperative weather and schedules, so there are not as many pictures as we would have liked. You can get a good idea of the relative distances and sizes though.
We begin our tour of the SOLar System at the outer reaches - Pluto
Pluto
If you look very closely at the center of the white rectangle on our 3X5 card, you can almost see the tiny poppy-seed sized dot that represents Pluto's relative size on this model's scale of 1 meter to 10 BILLION meters!! That makes our model approximately 600 meters long. That's over two football fields or 1200 1/2 meter steps from Sol all the way out to Pluto! Now, if you want a great idea of the vastness of space, just consider that using that scale, to reach the nearest star to our sun, you would have to walk another 4 MILLION meters, or 8 MILLION of those steps!! That's roughly the distance from San Francisco to New York!!!! Needless to say, we decided to skip that option. 8^) Looking out from Pluto, we can see Neptune a good way back down the road.
As we get closer, we find that Uranus has disappeared over the little hill, and even from Neptune's actual position in the model, we just can't get a bead on it.
After trudging (it was quite cold and threatening to storm, so the joy of the walking was greatly diminished, especially after return trips to repair the yarn link, get additional yarn, get the other camera because the digital photos were so disappointing, and pass out jackets - whew!) to the top of the rise, there it is! Disguised as a little girl in a pink jacket!
As we near Saturn, we can distinguish Ian riding rings around the little marble-sized dot representing one of the largest planets.
He stopped orbiting long enough for us to find it's location, and we continued on toward Jupiter.
Gee, I wonder if Toyota would like to give us a new little truck for all that great advertizing, hmmmm? LOL! That's a pretty big billboard when you consider that the planet it's parked next to, as Marcy is indicating, is about the size of a regular marble.
Now we can get a pretty good look at the inner planets. They are so much closer to each other than the outer planets are that we can get them all into one photo, along with the sun!
OK, so we did skip the asteroid belt, but it seemed rather ludicrous to grind up one poppy seed to sprinkle in a ring that runs around the sun between Mars and Jupiter. LOL! Yup! One poppy seed on this scale would represent ALL of the material in the asteroid belt!
That's Mars (better known as Lydia), Earth (Dale), Venus (Pam), Mercury (Marcy, again) and, arguably the most important figure, Sol (our own Maddy). At this scale, the sun is only about the size of a large grapefruit.
Taking a cue from Madeline L'Engle's great series of books, we attempted our own "Wrinkle In Time" space folding trick to wind up with the large and tightly wound skein of stellar matter you see at the last. You can see that the 3X5 card would only hold part of the sun's "dot". Remember, that big lump of yarn and ten 3X5 pieces of paper represent just 1/10,000,000,000th of one tiny line through our extremely spacious solar system.
SPACE - There's a whole lot more of it out there than you think!
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