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.
The result of her encouraging a love of science in her kids? This little slice of awesomeness. Nicely done, Mommy Chanson!
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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November 14th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Very cool. Boston has a nice scale solar system, too, but on a rather larger scale. It starts with part of the sun in the Museum of Science, with Mercury at the other end of the museum. Then the rest of the planets are arranged around the greater Boston area. I haven’t visited all of the planets, yet, but I’ve at least seen the inner four.
November 14th, 2008 at 11:03 am
The Griffith Observatory in LA has a nice planetary exhibit as well. It’s inside, so the distances are not shown to scale (you have to go outside for that, in the front lawn), but the planets are. The sun is also represented, but hidden. In addition, each planet has scales that tell you how much you weigh on the surface. Very cool. And my two-year-old loved to climb the statue of Einstein.
November 14th, 2008 at 11:20 am
How’s this for a scale model of the solar system?
http://www.spacedout-uk.com/solar_system/index.asp
Each location has a specially commissioned sculpture and it includes many of the minor solar system bodies too! Kids love this stuff. It doesn’t take much to fire their i-madge-inations.
November 14th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Here’s another one, in Sweden. They use the Stockholm Globe Arena as their model of the Sun.
http://ttt.astro.su.se/swesolsyst/englishsum.html
November 14th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Ithaca, New York has a nice one, the Carl Sagan Memorial Planet Walk. I keep meaning to do it — the Sun and the inner solar system fit nicely on the pedestrian mall downtown, but the rest of the Solar System is on a walk to the Sciencenter, about a km or so. The planets are also to scale (thus, tiny), and hard to see in the sealed plastic of the markers — at least the inner ones are. I know that I’ve mistaken the Moon for a speck on the plastic. Still impressive about how big the distances are.
When we had the DPS conference around here a month ago, they got Bill Nye to visit to lead a walk, and some volunteer planetary scientists to hang out near the planets to answer questions.
November 14th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Good one! But I hope Rational Mom told her son Nico that Pluto goes closer to the sun than Neptune only once per orbit.
November 14th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
I still think it’s pretty impressing that he got the orbital crossing in there at all. Doubt I knew that until quite late.
November 14th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Hey! The ICR could use that kid’s drawing in one of their textbooks.
Off topic but very interesting: http://www.icr.org/article/4272/
November 14th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Yes it is impressive, I sure didn’t know about that at his age and most adults I know don’t either.
November 14th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
I’ve been wondering for a while about Pluto and Neptune. Supposedly one of the requirements of being a planet is “clearing your orbit” – Pluto was demoted, at least in part, because it has not clear its orbit of other bodies, such as asteroids and icy objects. But Neptune has Pluto crossing its path! So doesn’t that mean that Neptune hasn’t cleared its orbit, either? Shouldn’t Neptune be a dwarf planet?
It’s obvious that Neptune is a gaseous planet, whereas Pluto and other such objects are more likely captured debris or such – but that isn’t part of the reason Pluto was demoted, so it underscores the sort of arbitrary nature of demoting Pluto.
I’m impressed that the drawing includes the asteroid belt – that was something I was sort of ignorant of as a kid (along with Pluto’s weird orbit). Is that largest one Ceres?
November 14th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Rational Moms would make a perfect name for a group actively fighting antivaccinationists. I’m just putting it out there.
November 15th, 2008 at 12:10 am
Look at that!! Even Pluto’s orbit is irregular!! Awesome!!
November 17th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
1m:10^9m, so to hike at the speed of light, you’d have to walk at 0.3m/s or 18m/min or just over 1kph. Light doesn’t leisurelyly stroll, it just crawls at this scale.