This post was edited by Nathaniel Smith on Mar, 2008
We have a 35 beautiful acre campus in the hills of western Massachusetts which unfortunately is still under a foot of snow. I want to make a double solar system scale using a MassGIS downloaded image (they have newer ones than Google Earth) and ImageJ. (http://www.mass.gov/mgis/colororthos2005.htm) From our school flagpole we can see nearly 400 meters across the athletic fields to the woods. A Solar System scale using Pluto as .1mm diameter will fit in this field.

Using ImageJ the students will plot out locations for the different planets. (Yes, out here in the wilds of Western Massachusetts Pluto is still a planet.)Using an on-line solar system calculator (http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/) the scale can be determined. At this scale, the sun could be a tennis ball and Pluto can be a grain of salt.

Using a video camera, the event is photographed (so Pluto can see what Mercury saw). Even with a 12:1 zoom, the card with the grain of salt attached is barely visible from the sun.

If you have difficult students they can be Oort's Cloud. (At this scale, this would place them out of district ... 388 km away.)

This is the Investigation Template for the Double Solar System activity.

Nate, this looks great! I'm eager to hear about how it goes.

Hi Nate,

This looks like a great way to help kids to understand the scale of the solar system.

Just so I understand, the kids first make an image using Image J labeling the locations on the school grounds, then you go outside and mark the locations with scaled objects?

Why do you need the video camera?

Also, what do you mean by a "double solar system scale"?

Thanks! Johanna

This post was edited by Nathaniel Smith on Mar, 2008
Johanna

It is a "double scale" because the planets are in scale with each other and the distances between the planets are also in the same scale.

I video tape the project from the sun's point of reference so the actor's in the outer solar system can see what happened during the activity as if they were looking from the sun.

You get a great view of how tiny pluto is because at this distance you cannot even see a 3x5 card holding the speck that is Pluto.

We use ImageJ to calculate distances from the Sun's location (the flagpole) to find where a student can stand holding their planet model.

To determine the scale ... ImageJ is used to measure the absolute maximum distance across the athletic fields. Setting this maximum to the sun-pluto distance on the website the scale for the rest of the planets fall out.

This is so fabulous! For so long, I've been hiking across our athletic fields with those annoying trundle wheels and calculating distances. What a great idea! I'm eager to try it!

Jody