A group of friends in Nevada used a dry lake bed in the desert to create what they claim is the first accurate scale model of the solar system with planetary orbits.
Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh, the men behind the project, claim to have been inspired to undertake the project by a quote from James Irwin, the fourth man to land on the moon, reported Sploid.
"As we got farther and farther away, the Earth diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine . . . seeing this has to change a man," the Apollo 15 pilot once wrote.
The two, after gathering a bunch of friends, requisitioned a seven-mile wide area in the Black Rock desert and constructed a scale model of the solar system, using a marble as the starting point, according to Newsmax.
"Every single picture of the solar system that we ever encounter is not to scale. If you put the orbits to scale on a piece of paper, the planets become microscopic, and you won't be able to see them," Overstreet explains in a video showing how the model was built.
With a scale of 1 astronomical unit per 577 feet, the scale model Mercury, Venus and Earth are, respectively, 224 feet, 447 feet and 579 feet away from the Sun.
Following that trend, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus are, respectively, 0.57 miles, 1.1 miles and 2.1 miles away from their model's center. Lastly, Neptune was 3.3 miles away from the center.
The group used cars to trace the planet's orbits and took time lapsed from the top of a nearby mountain to create a representation of the solar system, according to Fox News.
"We are on a marble floating in the middle of nothing," Overstreet says. "When you sort of come face-to-face with that it's staggering."
