![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/To-Scale_-THE-SOLAR-SYSTEM.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nConventional images of the Earth and the moon place them close together, the moon hovering, seemingly, right over our planet\u2019s shoulder. Of course, this isn\u2019t accurate; we know just from looking at the moon in the sky that it isn\u2019t nearly so large or close. But every image of the Earth and moon, and of the solar system in general, is out of proportion.<\/p>\n
To Scale\u2019s short film The Solar System opens by laying this out and asking the viewer if they\u2019ve noticed it.<\/p>\n
Wylie Overstreet, the man on camera, has noticed. Taking it a step further, he concludes that \u201cthe only way to see a scale model of the solar system is to build one.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Wiley holds a marble and a pin up to the camera, demonstrating how the moon and Earth are shown very close together. Photo: Screenshot<\/p>\n
Building the solar system to scale<\/p>\n
The project takes Wily to Nevada\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
To check proportions, Alex stands with the camera at mini-Earth\u2019s 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 \u201cEarth.\u201d Their math was right.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/To-Scale_-THE-SOLAR-SYSTEM1.jpeg\")
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The planets are so far apart that even their text labels are minuscule as the camera pulls out. Photo: Screenshot<\/p>\n
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It makes for a fascinating visual display. But the point of the project wasn\u2019t 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, \u201call you\u2019ve ever known,\u201d as small as, well, a marble.<\/p>\n