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Description
I’ve been meaning to put this image together for a while now. These sorts of images seem to be fairly popular, so I thought it might be fun to make one with my own captures.

So as you can probably tell, it’s a scale model of our solar system. It might not be instantly recognisable but I’ve actually scaled the size of the planets and the distances between the planets. They’re not to the same scale though – I’ve scaled it so the planets are about 2500 times too large. That’s assuming I’ve got my maths correct.

The image begins where the black starts to the left of Mercury – that’s where the centre of the Sun would be. We then have Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. For completeness, I’ll list the planetary sizes/distances I used at the end of this image description.

You may notice that the Earth is missing from this picture. The reason for this is because I’ve not imaged the Earth as a planet, obviously. So I put the Moon in its place. If you want an idea of how big the Earth is, it’s almost exactly the same size as Venus.

I originally planned to include the Sun in this image, but at the scales I chose it would have extended out past Saturn. The Sun is big.

To be honest, I’m not too happy with how the image turned out overall. Because of the large difference in size between the terrestrial planets and gas giants, I had to blow my Saturn image up by quite a bit. So, Saturn doesn’t look so crash hot. Similarly, I had to scale up Uranus and Neptune. However, because they weren’t much more than coloured blobs in the images I took of them, they didn’t look so good. So I cleaned them up a bit. It makes them stick out as a bit ‘artificial’ but at least they don’t look like squished bugs anymore.

Chances are I’ll keep updating this image over time as I get larger/better images of the planets.

The data I used, with rounding (mostly from Wikipedia, the most reliable source of information on the internet ):

Planet : Radius (km) : Distance (AU)

Mercury : 2440 : 0.35
Venus : 6050 : 0.7
The Moon : 1740 : 1
Mars : 3400 : 1.5
Jupiter : 71500 : 5
Saturn : 60270 : 10
Uranus: 25560 : 20
Neptune: 24760 : 30

Description
I’ve been meaning to put this image together for a while now. These sorts of images seem to be fairly popular, so I thought it might be fun to make one with my own captures.

So as you can probably tell, it’s a scale model of our solar system. It might not be instantly recognisable but I’ve actually scaled the size of the planets and the distances between the planets. They’re not to the same scale though – I’ve scaled it so the planets are about 2500 times too large. That’s assuming I’ve got my maths correct.

The image begins where the black starts to the left of Mercury – that’s where the centre of the Sun would be. We then have Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. For completeness, I’ll list the planetary sizes/distances I used at the end of this image description.

You may notice that the Earth is missing from this picture. The reason for this is because I’ve not imaged the Earth as a planet, obviously. So I put the Moon in its place. If you want an idea of how big the Earth is, it’s almost exactly the same size as Venus.

I originally planned to include the Sun in this image, but at the scales I chose it would have extended out past Saturn. The Sun is big.

To be honest, I’m not too happy with how the image turned out overall. Because of the large difference in size between the terrestrial planets and gas giants, I had to blow my Saturn image up by quite a bit. So, Saturn doesn’t look so crash hot. Similarly, I had to scale up Uranus and Neptune. However, because they weren’t much more than coloured blobs in the images I took of them, they didn’t look so good. So I cleaned them up a bit. It makes them stick out as a bit ‘artificial’ but at least they don’t look like squished bugs anymore.

Chances are I’ll keep updating this image over time as I get larger/better images of the planets.

The data I used, with rounding (mostly from Wikipedia, the most reliable source of information on the internet ):

Planet : Radius (km) : Distance (AU)

Mercury : 2440 : 0.35
Venus : 6050 : 0.7
The Moon : 1740 : 1
Mars : 3400 : 1.5
Jupiter : 71500 : 5
Saturn : 60270 : 10
Uranus: 25560 : 20
Neptune: 24760 : 30