Our Visit to the Solar System!
Posted by: chansonWednesday, November 12th, 2008
My kids are really into the solar system these days. As I mentioned in Love of Learning, they’ve been drawing and coloring pictures of the solar system, and lately they’ve taken to playing with toy planets and inventing their own imaginary planetary system (called “the imaginary solar system” — it includes two “Giant Earths,” “Zurg’s Planet,” and “The Planet of the Pitcher Poo-Poots,” among other imaginary planets). I’m not sure precisely why they’ve taken such an interest in the solar system, but I’m not complaining. In fact, a couple weeks ago my husband remembered that there’s a scale model of the solar system starting at Uetliberg hill, right in the outskirts of Zürich!
So we took the kids on a pleasant Sunday-afternoon hike through the solar system. Here’s the sun, at a scale of one meter equals a million kilometers:
And here’s Mercury:
It was great fun for us to get a feel for how the sizes and distances really compare! Here I am with my two kids standing beside Venus:
(My Nico is doing his “Mr. Bean” impression…)
You can see both the Earth and the moon (tiny little metal balls in little blue plexiglass arches) to get a feel for their relative sizes and how far apart they are from one another as well.
From the inner planets you can still see the sun quite well,
and all of the inner planets are just a short walk from one another. So you get a real learning experience when you see how far you have to hike to reach the orbits of the outer planets.
Here Léo has reached Jupiter:
And here’s Saturn:
By the time we got to Uranus, we’d been hiking for more than an hour! Lucky thing the solar system is so scenic!
There, finally Uranus!
Nico wanted to keep going, but Léo was starting to get cold, so we decided to try to find the nearest train station and go home. Neptune and Pluto will be for next time! What fun for the whole family! (Their daddy was there too, behind the camera. 
)
In addition to getting a feel for the scale, my kids learned about the asteroid belt (since the Uetliberg Planet Trail includes Ceres, a larger-than-average space rock like Pluto), and they learned that for part of Pluto’s orbit, it’s actually closer to the Sun than Neptune is. See how Nico included these items in one of his more recent drawings:
November 12th, 2008 at 8:50 am
Cool! Recently my son brought a book home from library about the sun… it was a real education (for me)!
November 12th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Rob A — That’s half the fun! I get to learn with my kids!
November 13th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Nice article. Uetliberg is the name of the hill, not of some town … just in case your readers get confused when trying to navigate there.
November 13th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Victor — Thanks for the correction! This just goes to show how clueless I still am about German after nearly a year of living here. I guess “berg” means hill, like iceberg or something? I’d always assumed there was a town somewhere around there, but just hadn’t seen it.
BTW, this article got picked up by Wired’s “Geek Dad” blog ( http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/11/visiting-zrich.html ), and readers there mentioned that there are also scale models of the solar system in St Kilda (Melbourne), Eugene (Oregon), Maine, Boston, Flagstaff (AZ), Champaign (IL), Vermont, and Boston. So there may be a different one closer to you!
November 14th, 2008 at 10:15 am
[...] I posted about the group parenting blog called Rational Moms before, but I wanted to give them a shout-out again. One of the blogging moms took her sons on a solar system walk near Zürich, and she wrote about it. [...]
November 14th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Have you shown them the exoplanet news? What could be more exciting than pictures of solar systems around distant stars?
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/11/13/huge-exoplanet-news-items-pictures/
November 14th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
There is another scale model of our solar system in Ithaca, New York. FYI, and thanks for the great post!
November 14th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Olaf — Wow, that’s amazing!!! In fact, my kids have been asking about other star systems, so I’ll have to show them that.
GK4 — Thanks! I had no idea how many there were, but the commenters over on Discover and Wired listed a bunch of them around the world. That’s cool that there are so many — it’s a fun outing and learning experience for all ages!
November 14th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
If you’re ever in Los Angeles, be sure to take them to the Griffith Observatory so they can see the scale model of Alpha Centauri in relation to the solar system (I believe it’s actually in scale to a model in Greenwich, but the principle is still sound).
November 15th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
This post inspired me to go to Griffith Park again. We took our son there when he was only 2 1/2 months old. I don’t think he appreciated it very much! That place is the best free entertainment in Los Angeles.
November 16th, 2008 at 4:15 am
[...] invented a fun new holiday to add to the holiday season. And some really adorable children took a visit to a scale model of the solar system, while their mom praises the local public [...]
November 17th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
There is something similar on The Mall in Washington DC, where the scale of the Solar System is laid out along the buildings of the Smithsonian. I believe it appropriately starts at the Air & Space Museum
November 19th, 2008 at 7:00 am
I believe the biggest scale model of the solar system is here in Sweden. The sun is a big spheric sports arena in stockholm and Pluto is somewhere 300 km north.
http://ttt.astro.su.se/swesolsyst/karta.html
http://ttt.astro.su.se/swesolsyst/englishsum.html
November 20th, 2008 at 6:11 am
[...] STARING AT, PRIVATE HANSON? WHAT IN THIS VAST COSMOS COULD POSSIBLY MAKE YOU BREAK FORMATION? A SCALE MODEL OF PLANET MARS? WELL, SWEET HONEY BUTTERCUPS, PRIVATE HANSON, I THINK YOU JUST WON RANDI’S MILLION DOLLAR [...]
November 21st, 2008 at 12:26 am
wow, that is cool! what a terrific place for an outing for secular families!
November 22nd, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Great post! I love the photos! We’ll definitely check out the solar system model in Boston when we go again this summer. Unfortunately, the trip from planet to planet won’t be nearly as scenic as yours!
November 26th, 2008 at 5:08 am
[...] much fun as it is to take the whole family on an astronomy outing, it’s easy to find fun astronomy tools at home, too — for free on the Internet! Today [...]
December 7th, 2008 at 9:30 am
[...] isn’t helpful for more than 90% of the people reading this. However, in the comments of our visit to the solar system we discovered that there are scale models of the solar system all over the world! Similarly, [...]