How Far Away is the Moon? (The Scale of the Universe)
Same thing with the distances between the orbits of all the planets and their distance from the sun. In reality they are spread out a lot more than is shown on diagrams.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
«How Far Apart?»
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Some Rights Reserved
It's amazing how we are fooled by diagrams. My hubby built an orrery and it looks fine, even though we *know* that the distances are wrong and also that the true orbits are far from circular.
ReplyDeleteThe Jodrell Bank observatory in north west England has a "planet path" in its arboretum which is a real eye-opener regarding planetary distances. http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/visitorcentre/downloads/worksheet_planet_path.pdf
@ Linda: Are the planets scale size to each other at the Jodrell Bank Observatory? Is the sun the size of a basket ball, and Earth smaller than a pea?
ReplyDelete@ Marf: It's a long time since I was there, but the website says, "They are all to scale, where the Sun is the size of the Lovell Telescope, so that 1 cm represents 180 kilometres."
ReplyDeleteThe telescope is a helluva lot bigger than a basketball!
"Diameter of bowl 76.2 metres".
It's quite something close up. I was awed.
I must visit again soon...