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Sun is scaled one meter (39") in diameter. Actual Size of Sun: 1,391,000 km (864,000 mi) AU (“Astronomical Unit”) is the average distance between the Sun and Earth: 150 million km (93 million mi) A little more than 100 Sun diameters will span the distance of one AU.
This is a simple little model to give you an overview of the distances between the orbits of the planets and other objects in our Solar System. Provide a quick, easy-to-make and remember scale of the approx distances of the planetʼs orbits and orbital distance of other realms (asteroids, Kuiper Belt) from the Sun.
Use your large parks to create a TRULY scale model Solar System in both size AND scale, something practically impossible in any other venue. It can be elaborate, like in the above picture from the Peoria Riverfront Museum in IL, or just print out the NASA "Planets to Scale PDF," and find some space.
• Talk about what a solar system model that demonstrates the relative average distances between the planets and the Sun and the relative sizes of the planets would look like. Save your Solar System Statistics cards for future activities.
Download the Scale Size and Distance Spreadsheet (XLSX or CSV) or the Solar System Sizes and Distances reference guide if calculating manually. Decide on the diameter of Earth in your scale model. Keep in mind that a 1-cm Earth means the scale distance from the Sun to Neptune is about two miles.
This data will allow you to make a scale model of the solar system. For younger students, do a distance-only model. For older students, you might want to scale the size of the planets to the same scale as for the distances.
Real and Scaled Distances of the Planets. The scale factor is 1 to 10 billion. Every meter in this scale model solar system represents 10 billion meters in the real solar system. Similarly, every step in the scale model solar system represents 10 billion steps in the real solar system!
