A resort with an astronomical attraction: a 6-km scale solar system model
Wife and I were looking at a quirky old resort on Vancouver Island, Yellow Point Lodge, which has been there since the 1930s. Tagline? “Eat. Read. Sleep.” One of the features of the resort? A solar system model … kilometers across.
“Walk, run, bike or drive our accurately scaled, six-kilometer model of the Solar System. The Sun is located just behind the Boathouse cabin and planets are located at various locations on the property or in the neighbourhood.”
They have a nicely illustrated map of the model. What a nice, wholesome thing. And a genuine attraction for me!
A long time ago, I taught a few community centre workshops in basic astronomy, and making a solar system model was always a highlight. Anyone new to astronomy is easily impressed by the scale problem: if you make the model small enough to be fit in a parking lot, the small planets are all but invisible, smaller than motes of dust. But if you make the planets big enough to see, the size of the model quickly gets out of hand.
Even with a small solar system model, the down-scaled distance to Proxima Centauri is mind-blowing for the uninitiated. If the solar system was just 100 meters across — with a 15mm Sun, and an Earth the size of a grain of salt — then the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) would be … almost 1000 kilometers away. And the whole Milk Way at that scale would still be immense, more than 10 million kilometers across.
Even with plenty of experience, my mind still boggles at this stuff. While beginners have trouble believing it!