The scale of our Solar System is often difficult to comprehend. 2 of my astronomy students have come up with imaginative ways to show its scale. Janet Stooks envisioned it using her driveway. 2 photographs show it imaged from the Sun and from Pluto . Jeff Russell puts the solar system in perspective for Central New Yorkers by scaling the Solar System down so that the Sun is represented by the Carrier Dome and the rest of the planets follow accordingly.
Lets first look at the sizes of the planets.
So we can find the ratio of the planet's size to the Sun's size and multiply this by 160 to produce its scaled size in m. We list the distances in million km. These distances must be divided by 9 million to give the scaled distance. For instance, Mercury's distance is 58 million km, which divided by 9 million gives 6.6 km. Since we are used to measuring distances in miles, this distance is then divided by 1.6 to produce the scaled distance in miles.