Astronomy Blog

Build your own Solar System

I have just chanced across a good resource for people wanting to do practical demonstrations about the size of the solar system. It is a page that lets you specify how big you want the Sun to be and then it calculates the size of the planets and their distances, relative to this value - something I have done myself with a calculator many times. It is part of San Francisco's Exploratorium website which also has some other pages that let you calculate your age and weight on other planets. A quote comes to mind:

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." - the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Perhaps our immediate space isn't that big though.