To Scale: THE SOLAR SYSTEM

To Scale:
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2015–2025
YouTube
16.5M views · 11 years ago · documentary · evergreen

A short documentary in which a small team builds a true-to-scale model of the solar system across a dry lakebed in the Black Rock Desert. The planets and their distances are laid out at the same scale, so the emptiness of space becomes something you can see.

HN people use it as the go-to visual for how big and empty the solar system really is, and cite it whenever a scale model comes up.

“here’s an absolutely brilliant video illustrating the scale”
Explorable explanations & visual explanation
#scalemodel#solarsystem#visualexplanation#documentary#astronomy

8 comments from Hacker News

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@whiteboardr2022 · in “If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014)”
For those who do not want to scroll, here’s an absolutely brilliant video illustrating the scale: ▶ this video
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@silasdb2025 · in “If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)”
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] ▶ this video
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@gabrielsroka2022 · in “The Sweden Solar System (world’s largest model of our planetary system)”
These two videos of other solar system models are great: ▶ this video link
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a
@adwn2015 · in “To Scale: The Solar System”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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k
@kirk212015 · in “To Scale: The Solar System”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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a
@aetherson2023 · in “Sweden Solar System”
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. ▶ this video
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@whiteboardr2022 · in “100k Stars Chrome visualization experiment”
This here too: ▶ this video
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@frogpelt2015 · in “Pluto ‘Wows’ in Spectacular New Backlit Panorama”
Also, this guy built a scale model in the Black Rock Desert: ▶ this video EDIT: This one doesn't include Pluto.
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