A new project by Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh sought to explain just how vast our local neighbourhood of planets, dwarf planets, asteroids and comets really is, by building the first scale ...

A to-scale, 1-mile-long model of the solar system that is 4.5 billion times smaller than the actual system lines the West Woodruff Avenue sidewalk.

Scale Model of the Solar System Normally, what textbooks do is to show two separate scales. One scale showing the orbits of the planets and another scale showing the size of the planets.

Still from "To Scale: The Solar System," a 7-minute video that shows the construction of a scale-model solar system in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. (Image credit: Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh) ...

Launched in 2000, the solar system project began with students and community members building scaled models of the planets at a scale of 93 million to 1—and over the years, the project has grown ...

A 3D Augmented Reality model of Saturn (Credit: Google, NASA) The new partnership has also seen the ‘Our Solar System’ project added to Google Arts & Culture.

Those proportions are kept honest in the scale model, in which an Earth that's only the size of a small marble calls for a solar system that's 7 miles wide.

Using a dry lake bed in the Black Rock Desert north of Reno, the duo built their solar system model complete with planetary orbits. The project really puts into perspective just how tiny our home ...