Our sun is about 865,370 miles (or 1,392,678 km) in diameter. If we reduced its size by a factor of about 15,000 times, it would be 60 feet across – the same diameter across as the Sun patio you are standing on. It would also extend 30 feet into the ground and 30 feet into the air – about the height of the library. The Sun is almost perfectly round, so our Sun patio represents a cross-section of the Sun at any angle.
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Stand at the west edge of the Sun patio and look for a small round concrete marker along the path about 25 feet away. This is Mercury. If we shrink Mercury by the same factor that we did for the Sun, it would be about 2.5 inches in size. Next to the 60-foot Sun patio, you can see how small Mercury is compared to the Sun. The sizes of the Sun and the 8 planets on our solar system walk are all the same scale. However, the distances we use are shrunk even further. If we didn't, the Mercury model would be a half mile away from the Sun patio! So, we shrink the distance scale even more, by a factor of another 100 times.
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The average distance of Venus from the Sun is about twice that of Mercury. Our reduced distance scale puts the Venus model at about 47 feet from the Sun patio, but it should be almost 1 mile away.
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Planet Earth orbits the Sun on average about 93,000,000 miles away. Our Earth model is 64 feet from the Sun patio but should be 6,400 feet away near the baseball field at Seminole High School. Notice that Earth and its sister planet Venus are the same size.
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In our scale model of the solar system, Mars is 98 feet from the Sun. Mars should really be almost 2 miles away in Boca Ciega Millennium Park. Luckily, the four giant planets are within walking distance if we continue down the path.
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The area between Mars and Jupiter is where most of the asteroids in the solar system are found. At the size scale of 1 foot ≈ 15,000 miles, the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt would be only a quarter of an inch in diameter. Perhaps you can find some very small pebbles along the way to represent large asteroids. Jupiter: Near a bench by the athletic field is a 6-foot-wide model of Jupiter. This is the largest planet in the sola system and yet it is still one tenth the diameter of the Sun. Our model of Jupiter is 334 feet from the Sun patio but should be over 6 miles away – about as far away as the planetarium on the SPC Gibbs campus in St Petersburg.
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Walk past the pavilion along the pond to find a model of Saturn and some of its rings. Saturn is about 615 feet away from the Sun patio but should be located over 11.6 miles away, near the St. Petersburg Pier. The planet of Saturn is slightly smaller than Jupiter, but its ring system is quite large. The ring you see in the model is actually 4 ring systems (A, B, C and D). If we included every ring observed by spacecraft, our model would extend anywhere from 40 feet across to as much as ten times that distance. You can see why we are only representing the innermost rings.
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Note: The next two planets are at least a 20-minute roundtrip walk to the northern edge of campus. Uranus is first, then Neptune. Both are smaller giant planets found in the outer solar system. Our models for both planets are about 2 feet across. The Sun patio is not visible from here, but Uranus is 1230 feet away and Neptune is 1937 feet away. At this size scale, Uranus should be over 23 miles away near downtown Tampa and Neptune almost 37 miles away in Sarasota.
