I visited the school again today, this time to take the fifth graders out on a tour of the inner solar system. We started out by walking to the sun (don’t worry, we didn’t burn up because we went at night).
The sun, in our scale model, is an orange disc about 54.5 inches in diameter, scaled down from it’s actual size of 1.39 million kilometers (our scale is just over 1 billion to 1). You can see the sun in this picture on side of the gym building. This picture was taken after we traveled the equivalent of 150 million kilometers (489 feet in our scale model) to the earth. Of course, there wasn’t room in our model for all of us to stand on the earth, which is only a half inch in diameter at this scale. Nevertheless, we had a good time and who knows, some of the students may have actually learned something.