Nothing happens in Nevada, which is why a group of friends temporarily claimed about 7 miles of dessert land there to work on a fun little experiment. What did they want to do? They were tired of all the images of the solar system that aren't to scale and wanted to make an accurate representation of what the solar system would look like if it was built to scale.

They spent the day driving around the dessert tracing the distances and mapping the orbits while creating an epic time lapse video to show how the orbits and sizes of the planets really look. The scale that they used marked 1 Astronomical Unit as 176 meters (577 feet). An Astronomical Unit is 93 million miles.

Mapping from the sun all the way out to Jupiter took up .57 miles of space (so 1.14 miles from one end of the orbit to the other.) While the distance from Jupiter to Neptune required an extra distance of just under 3 miles, and they used actual marbles for some of the planets while using something like a beach ball for the sun.

Here's a really cool video that talks about what they did.

https://vimeo.com/139407849?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000618

zanderlex : That is pretty cool. It always used to surprise me how little most people really know about the solar system. I was always into science so I could name all NINE planets in order from a young age. And knew that the outer planets increased in distance from the sun somewhat proportionally on out. Now, in my adult life, I meet people who can't even show you where they live on a map of the US. THAT surprises me. Not sure what that means.