Conventional images of the Earth and the moon place them close together, the moon hovering, seemingly, right over our planet’s shoulder. Of course, this isn’t accurate; we know just from looking at the moon in the sky that it isn’t nearly so large or close. But every image of the Earth and moon, and of the solar system in general, is out of proportion.
To Scale’s short film The Solar System opens by laying this out and asking the viewer if they’ve noticed it.
Wylie Overstreet, the man on camera, has noticed. Taking it a step further, he concludes that “the only way to see a scale model of the solar system is to build one.”
Wiley holds a marble and a pin up to the camera, demonstrating how the moon and Earth are shown very close together. Photo: Screenshot
Building the solar system to scale
The project takes Wily to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert with his friend and cameraman, Alex. They start setting up, laying vast circles over seven miles of desert. It takes that much space to make a scale model using a marble-sized Earth. By chasing lights around the orbits at night and filming from an overlooking mountaintop, they hope to give an accurate idea of the scales involved, from above.
To check proportions, Alex stands with the camera at mini-Earth’s orbit while Wiley raises the meter-and-a-half-wide sun. Then, they wait for the (actual, full-scale) sun to rise. Its size exactly matches the model, standing from the perspective of “Earth.” Their math was right.
The planets are so far apart that even their text labels are minuscule as the camera pulls out. Photo: Screenshot
It makes for a fascinating visual display. But the point of the project wasn’t just a matter of proportion. Wiley reminds us that only a few dozen people have gotten to see the entirety of Earth from space. Onscreen, old footage plays of a few of them, describing how it felt to see the Earth so small and distant. They use different words but all describe the same sight: the Earth, “all you’ve ever known,” as small as, well, a marble.
By depicting the solar system to scale, Wiley’s goal was “to try and capture [that] we are on a marble, floating in the middle of nothing. When you…come face to face with that, it’s staggering.”
