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The Solar System

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BusNative;2001869; said:
Fucking intrawebs are full of shit then... that other site told me I'm the only one of me... with numbers that big, there has to be at least a few more.
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'BusNative of Garbletronia nods his sixteen feet in agreement. He's also glad his planet let him keep his apostrophe.
 
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knapplc;2001428; said:
I ran across this little project on the internet the other day, and today I built a scale model of the solar system to show my daughter. It was actually pretty neat.

..snip...

It's a fun experiment. If you have a place with about 3,000 feet to work with, I highly recommend doing it. It really puts things into perspective.
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That's a great demonstration, especially for a kid, to give an idea of the scale. Nothing in any of the astronomy books really can show that, for obvious reasons.

When I was in grad school I was a TA for an astronomy class (physics major) and we did a similar demonstration, but we only went as far as Saturn. Kudos to you for going all the way to Pluto. Could you even see your "sun" from out there? Maybe try putting a flashlight or lamp there if you repeat it.

As far as the material in interplanetary space, yes it's filled with some stuff, but the concentration is very very very much lower than what we experience in Earths atmosphere. On earth, any surface is going to be bombarded with millions and billions of various molecules (nitrogen, oxygen, CO2, and other stuff). In space, you can count the interactions with atoms and molecules in ones and tens per minute, so it's very close to being a true vacuum, but not quite.

Oh, and speaking of scale. You know the international space station right? The ISS is in low Earth orbit with an average orbital altitude of just ~250 miles! So, if you have a globe in the house, look for Ohio. The distance from the Indiana to PA across Ohio is roughly 250 miles. So imagine that width stood up on side and that's where the ISS is, on average. It's really not very far away.
 
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Zander42;2002260; said:
Hmmm, a mitten?:confused:


:) Do you mean kitten? :)
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Nope.

michiganmapdarkblue2784.gif
 
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Zander42;2002171; said:
When I was in grad school I was a TA for an astronomy class (physics major) and we did a similar demonstration, but we only went as far as Saturn. Kudos to you for going all the way to Pluto. Could you even see your "sun" from out there? Maybe try putting a flashlight or lamp there if you repeat it.
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Not at all, not even with the binoculars I brought. I had put a 1x2 foot US flag in the ground next to Mars to mark the end of the inner, rocky planets, and I could just barely see that with the binoculars. I had cheated and set the fish bowl on top of my wife's SUV hoping we could still see it, but with the naked eye we could barely see the SUV. There was a sun flare off the fender, so that helped give us a visual, but even then it was tiny.

I told my daughter that from Pluto the sun looks just like another star. Not sure if that registered or not.
 
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BusNative;2001445; said:
[Hawking]
hawking_1388171c.jpg


Pluto isn't a planet anymore... fuckin' n00b[/Hawking]
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[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J-FqrMf-kk"]The Mighty Stephen Hawking - YouTube[/ame]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89jt7zJzkNQ"]MC Hawking - What We Need More Of Is Science - YouTube[/ame]
 
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