Why this site exists
In 2024 I worked out the distances of the solar system at a scale that fits a living room, and hung up the Sun and the planets. What happened next is the reason for this site: my children, our guests and I understood for the first time how far apart all of it really is.
The picture everyone carries is wrong
Not imprecise, but wrong. On every poster, in every textbook and in almost every animation the planets sit comfortably side by side, with the Sun as a ball at the edge. That is not sloppiness but necessity: a sheet of paper has an edge, and at true scale there would be almost nothing to see on it. So the distortion is built in, and because it looks the same everywhere, we take it for reality.
That flips as soon as you look at the true-scale model from a few metres away.
What you build it from is up to you
This site supplies the numbers. What you make of them is the nicer half of the work, and it needs no instructions from me. The Sun can be a turned wooden sphere, an inflated balloon, a circle of chalk on the tarmac. At many scales the inner planets are mere grains anyway: a poppy seed for Mercury, a sesame seed for Earth, a pinhead for Mars. For the gas giants something in the house almost always fits, a marble, a cherry, a table-tennis ball.
And if you fancy something more elaborate, you might make the Earth glow: an optical fibre whose tip is exactly the diameter Earth is allowed at that scale, glowing blue. At a living-room scale that reaches the Earth, that is perhaps 0.6 mm. Bright enough to find, small enough to marvel at.
Who makes this
I am Niels Hegmans, a web designer from Cologne, Germany. This is a private project with no advertising, no sign-up and no affiliation with NASA or JPL. Body data come from JPL Horizons and are public domain; the printable sheets are CC BY 4.0. If you spot an error, especially in a number, please tell me. The address is in the imprint.