[HN Gopher] Sweden Solar System
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       Sweden Solar System
        
       Author : titaniumtown
       Score  : 128 points
       Date   : 2023-12-31 12:04 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
        
       | petepete wrote:
       | I do find it frustrating on Wikipedia that when you click on the
       | map to enlarge it the markers vanish.
       | 
       | I understand why, but the hyperlink should be to a bigger map
       | viewer, not the bare underlying image.
        
         | pestatije wrote:
         | yeah, thats definitely a bug in the specs
        
         | formerly_proven wrote:
         | I dunno why but WP detests interactive features for some reason
         | and the few that do exist are disabled in the mobile view (e.g.
         | collapsible sections). Another example: all those tables where
         | measurements are spelled out twice, in metric and imperial,
         | wasting a huge amount of screen space and making everything
         | harder to read instead of having a "[mm] [in]" switch once per
         | table or page.
        
       | jholzer wrote:
       | Very cool to see TNOs on this. I never appreciated how far away
       | Sedna is, TIL it's not even close to the Kuiper belt!
        
       | mongol wrote:
       | Interesting to see Oumuamua there. But it was my understanding
       | that it was just briefly visiting our solar system and will leave
       | us behind?
       | 
       | https://www.swedensolarsystem.se/en/oumuamua/
        
         | Giorgi wrote:
         | Yes, but whole system looks like it is designed as a tourist
         | attraction anyways.
        
       | mongol wrote:
       | The sun is represented by the spherical Avicii Arena, which used
       | to be the largest spherical building in the world. That is, until
       | Las Vegas' Sphere was built. Now the United States have the
       | opportunity to create an even larger solar system model!
        
         | petersumskas wrote:
         | The Las Vegas sphere is pretty large. I'm not sure how it
         | compares to the dome at Siding Springs but in sure that would
         | be a very large scale model.
         | https://www.visitnsw.com/destinations/country-nsw/warrumbung...
        
       | Findecanor wrote:
       | I live close by "Earth" and "Mars". "Earth" is one of the few
       | pieces made to depict its planet somewhat accurately, with the
       | continents correct and the moon at the correct distance and
       | (almost) correct size. Unfortunately the Natural History museum
       | it is in is closed for renovation so you can't go there at the
       | moment.
       | 
       | Most of the other pieces, are more art than science. "Mars" looks
       | more like an old-fashioned soccer ball than the planet, IMHO.
        
         | jenadine wrote:
         | Is it a coincidence that the scaled earth's path crosses the
         | Natural History museum?
        
           | robin_reala wrote:
           | Presumably: the Museum was built in 1916, and the Globe in
           | 1989.
        
       | sakjur wrote:
       | Walking from Globen (the sun) to Naturhistoriska (the earth)
       | could be made into a quite nice 10 km walk, with possible detours
       | to see much of the old worker's town of Sodermalm, the old town,
       | the city center around Klara/Norrmalm, the urban residential area
       | Sibirien, the university and finally ending up at the science
       | museum Naturhistoriska.
       | 
       | The Stockholm novels by Per Anders Fogelstrom starting with "City
       | of My Dreams" largely plays out across that walk, if you're
       | interested in the 19th/20th century evolution of the city and its
       | working class.
       | 
       | The metro's art project is also pretty cool if you take the
       | subway when you're in Stockholm, with unique artwork at each
       | station (spanning from a few pieces almost hidden away next to
       | the ad billboards to the whole station decorated to an elaborate
       | theme).
        
       | patrickwalton wrote:
       | This is so cool! I've wanted to make something like this for
       | years. I did the math for using Spaceport America as the sun and
       | Pluto would have been as far as Wyoming.
        
       | aetherson wrote:
       | I've been interested in scale models of the solar system (or
       | other astronomical systems like say the moon system of Jupiter)
       | for a while, partly to try to teach my kids stuff and partly just
       | because I think they're cool.
       | 
       | My opinion is that this solar system model is too big to be
       | useful. If you're trying to teach people about the scales of
       | space, I think you need something humanly navigable, ideally
       | something where you can see with a single sight-line back to the
       | previous object in the model, or, failing that, where at least
       | you can walk between elements of the model in a short enough time
       | that you can kind of keep yourself on-task and thinking about the
       | model for the whole walk.
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | I dunno... Earth is 4.7 mi from the sun. That's walkable.
         | 
         | I like that this actually gives you a sense of real meaningful
         | distance and size. This is a sun that's still big compared to
         | humans, and a distance to the earth that isn't negligible.
         | 
         | And then a real lesson about how insanely larger the solar
         | system is when you try to get out to Jupiter and beyond.
        
           | aetherson wrote:
           | It's walkable, but you can't see the "sun" from the "earth,"
           | and it's walkable in well more than an hour, at which point I
           | don't think that you're really keeping the scale in mind.
           | 
           | We can always look at images or whatever if we want to get an
           | intellectual sense of the scale of things. I think the
           | advantage of a model is that you feel immersed in it, and I
           | don't think you do at this scale.
           | 
           | It's challenging! It's hard to find a location and a scale
           | which gives you this human sense of the sizes involved. At
           | most scales, you have to make the planets pinpricks in size.
           | But, especially for the inner system, you can make it work.
           | 
           | EDIT: Here's I think something that works.
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3Igc3Rhfg
        
           | RetroTechie wrote:
           | For a better perspective on scale, they should do a model
           | where in 1 place you have the sun, its planets, asteroid
           | belts etc, and (to scale!) in a 2nd place you have a model
           | representing the nearest star system (Alpha Centauri).
           | 
           | Oh... and of course put in where Voyager, Pioneer & New
           | Horizons probes are these days - after 40+ _years_ of travel
           | at ~15km /s.
        
             | aetherson wrote:
             | I think this is near-impossible. The diameter of earth is
             | about 12,700 km. So if the distance between the Sun and
             | Alpha Centauri were "the maximum distance available on
             | Earth," then the scale is 3.25 billion to 1.
             | 
             | The sun's radius is about 696,000 km, so 7x10^6 meters, so
             | at 3.25 x 10^9:1 scale, it's about 2mm across. The planets
             | would all be specks. You could see orbits, though they'd be
             | small. And that's if you place your alpha centauri model
             | literally "on the other side of the world" from your sol
             | model.
        
         | low_tech_love wrote:
         | Is it an actual linear scale?
        
           | aetherson wrote:
           | The Sweden one? Seems like yes to me.
        
         | generationP wrote:
         | > humanly navigable
         | 
         | This is Sweden; I would bet that there are hiking trails
         | connecting everything on that map, although maybe not a single
         | one for all the planets. Roslagsleden (13 day hikes) + the
         | first 9 etapper of Vikingaleden bring you from (close to) Mars
         | to Uranus. And these are some nice hikes:
         | 
         | https://www.roslagen.se/roslagsleden
         | 
         | https://www.roslagen.se/vandra-vikingaleden
        
         | prewett wrote:
         | There's one north of Boston [1] that I accidentally found
         | walking one time. Turns out I remembered it from a HN posting
         | some years ago. I'd already walked some 3 mi or so by the time
         | I walked across Neptune, so couldn't go all the way to
         | Topsfield and back. I thought it gave a really good sense of
         | how big space is. It's about 1 mi from Neptune to Uranus and
         | another mile or so to Saturn (as far as I got). On my return I
         | walked directly at a fast walking pace, so it took some 20
         | minutes to from Saturn to Uranus and another 20 minutes to
         | Neptune. (Distances and times are approximate.) At the time I
         | think I calculated my walking speed to be four times the speed
         | of light. It's pretty awesome, in the original sense, that
         | going 4x light speed it still takes a long time to get from one
         | outer planet to the next.
         | 
         | Wikipedia has quite a list of other models [2], although it
         | doesn't seem to include Topsfield, MA.
         | 
         | [1] https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/chronicle-
         | transcript/2021/...
         | 
         | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model
        
       | crazygringo wrote:
       | Seems like there could/should be one for New York -- it could use
       | the spherical Hayden Planetarium [1] as the sun. Which would be a
       | conveniently somewhat smaller scale.
       | 
       | (To be fair, it does already have scale models of the planets
       | right next to it, just not at scale distances [2].)
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Center_for_Earth_and_Spac...
       | 
       | [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amnh_fg09.jpg
        
         | anatnom wrote:
         | At scale distances from the 27m sphere planetarium (as the
         | sun), earth would be a 24 cm sphere at distance of 2.8 km. From
         | looking at a map, this could be a basketball somewhere a few
         | blocks NNE of Times Square. (Pluto, however, would be 114km
         | away. Dunno where that would be. Maybe Allentown, PA?)
        
       | VikingCoder wrote:
       | Is the Vegas Sphere the largest hemispherical object?
        
         | mongol wrote:
         | Yes it is. The sun in this model used to be.
        
       | simonjgreen wrote:
       | I'm actually quite surprised there isn't a Tom Scott video about
       | this! I half expected the link to take me to his final video and
       | this be the title.
        
       | sponaugle wrote:
       | There is a smaller scale version of this on the CU campus:
       | 
       | https://www.colorado.edu/fiske/colorado-scale-model-solar-sy...
       | 
       | It is 1:10 Billion, so about a half-mile from the Sun top Pluto.
        
         | JKCalhoun wrote:
         | Eugene, Oregon has one as well:
         | https://eugenesciencecenter.org/exhibits/eugene-solar-system...
        
       | deadbabe wrote:
       | I'd love to do a road trip visiting all these planets! When is a
       | good time?
        
         | daneel_w wrote:
         | Any. We still have four seasons, sort of, so come on over and
         | enjoy either while you still can.
        
           | tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
           | Wouldn't recommend roadtrip in December unless you like
           | driving in darkness.
           | 
           | The most northern part of this solar system is in kiruna,
           | where next sunrise is 2nd of January and that day sun will be
           | upp less than 30 minutes.
        
       | sph wrote:
       | If my calculations are correct, at that scale of 1:20,000,000 the
       | closest star Proxima Centauri is ~2 million km away, or 5.22
       | times the distance to the Moon.
       | 
       | Space is fucking huge.
        
       | beAbU wrote:
       | Is this scale model accurate to relative sizes of the bodies, or
       | only distance? That's something I've not been able to find out.
        
         | Gare wrote:
         | Both, that's the whole point of these models. Also size
         | compared to the distance is true to scale.
        
         | dmurray wrote:
         | Both, but they cheated a bit on the Sun. Per TFA:
         | 
         | > To respect the scale, the globe represents the Sun including
         | its corona.
         | 
         | That's not really a meaningful measurement as the corona could
         | extend anywhere from a few hundred thousand to a few million
         | kilometres. If the Avicii Arena represented a more normal
         | measurement of the sun, the rest of the planets should be ~50%
         | greater in diameter and ~50% further dispersed. Sweden would
         | still have room!
        
       | workfromspace wrote:
       | There is a smaller version in Zagreb as well:
       | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Views
       | 
       | I was there this summer. It was a fun event trying to find them
       | all.
        
       | adonovan wrote:
       | I showed this to my brother, who lives in Stockholm. His
       | response: "Typical bloody Stockholmers, thinking everything
       | revolves around them!" ;-)
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Related:
       | 
       |  _There's an entire solar system hiding inside Sweden_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36687868 - July 2023 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _The Sweden Solar System (world's largest model of our planetary
       | system)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32944427 - Sept
       | 2022 (3 comments)
       | 
       |  _The Sweden Solar System_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26424090 - March 2021 (72
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Sweden Solar System Photos_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8181696 - Aug 2014 (2
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Sweden Solar System_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8167192 - Aug 2014 (40
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _The Sweden Solar System_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2220903 - Feb 2011 (26
       | comments)
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-31 23:01 UTC)