To Scale: THE SOLAR SYSTEM

To Scale: · 16.5M views · 2015-09-16 · 7:07

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Overview

A short film in which friends build the first true-to-scale model of the solar system, with full planetary orbits, on a Nevada dry lakebed. It conveys the real distances and sizes involved.

On Hacker News

Shared as the best visceral demonstration of solar system scale.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2015–2025

Topics

Cosmology & astrophysics Space exploration & spaceflight Data visualization & information design

What people said

silasdb · 2025-06 · Recommendation
This is a great website—it reminds me of To Scale: The Solar System [1], a mini-documentary where people attempt to build a true-to-scale model of the Solar System. It makes me feel like a tiny speck of dust, floating in the vastness of nowhere... [1] [VIDEO]
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aetherson · 2023-12 · Reference
It's walkable, but you can't see the "sun" from the "earth," and it's walkable in well more than an hour, at which point I don't think that you're really keeping the scale in mind. We can always look at images or whatever if we want to get an intellectual sense of the scale of things. I think the advantage of a model is that you feel immersed in it, and I don't think you do at this scale. It's challenging! It's hard to find a location and a scale which gives you this human sense of the sizes involved. At most scales, you have to make the planets pinpricks in size. But, especially for the inner system, you can make it work. EDIT: Here's I think something that works. [VIDEO]
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frogpelt · 2015-09 · Reference
Also, this guy built a scale model in the Black Rock Desert: [VIDEO] EDIT: This one doesn't include Pluto.
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Sources

Video by To Scale:, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

Data and selection notes

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