If it's 5th grade then....

[Dr Mordrid]

....it's time to make a solar system model

Erik has gone extreme and plans on two displays; sun through the asteroid belt & Ceres in the first and Jupiter out to Eris in the other.

His plan is to model, and paint in detail where possible, all 8 major planets (Mercury through Neptune), the asteroid belt and the 5 minor planets (Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris), which means I get roped into supervising, consulting on the paint jobs & colors and figuring out how to do 4 ring systems and the asteroid belt.

The Sun and base coats for the rest are tonights project. Also have to print out NASA images where available.

Pray for me

[Nowhere]

How big/portable/foldable it has to be?

Personally I would probably make everything out of highly translucent foil stretched on a frame, with "spherical" bodies beeing half-spheres held in place by two small magnets, made out of styrofoam/etc. to minimise sagging (though it could be used as a nice visualisation of Einstein ideas ). With asteroids/trojans/greeks/etc. represented by semi-random, very small dots of permanent ink marker or grains of sand (scaterred just before final exposition) - easy to keep scale of asteroid belt objects nice, together with its faint nature generally (main reason for the whole thing beeing on translucent foil & frame...you basically asked about it ). Also nice background for drawing orbits of major bodies. Rings - half wheels of translucent plexi/photographic film (at least for the complex ones of Saturn...) embedded in proper styrofoam half-spheres - necassary due to too high, usually, tilt to eclyptic (which also means that some minor planets need to have separate support, outside of foil)

Yes, the most important reason to share this idea is because of me beeing mean and hoping you'll fall for the trap

Oh, and have fun.

[Dr Mordrid]

The spheres run the gamut from Styrofoam to Nerf balls and papier-mache' and marbles (one we have is a ringer for Titan). Moons modeled will be Earths, Europa, Enceladus, Titan and Charon.

The asteroid belt will be a 15 degree section made of acrylic studded with grains of sand, small pebbles and Ceres at the proper location.

A side display will be a 2.5 kg meteorite I collected as a boy on our farm. Damned thing whistled over our heads and went "whump" in a freshly plowed field...which did make it easy enough to find.

[Nowhere]

Ahhh, but that (if I understand the concept with acrylic section correctly) would possibly reinforce/introduce (5th graders after all) the idea which many people have, that asteroid belt is some sort of massive concentration of rocks/has virtual monopoly on asteroids in our system; not so, the density is simply somewhat larger then elsewhere...and so the foil would allow dots/sand to be placed randomly outside of the belt (main reason why I came up with this concept)

btw, gotta find me some meteorite one day... Perhaps I'll have slightly better chances soon - there's again some snow here, and I guess it will quickly stop snowing but the snow will be left like that for larger part of the month; supposedly good conditions for finding small ones, and I am going to province in a week or so...

edit: oh, and lots of lakes there; frozen lake, covered with snow - even better, I guess.

[Dr Mordrid]

We were considering a couple near Earth asteroids for completeness, but we'll see how long it takes to do the rest first.

[MultimediaMan]

Total awesomeness in this thread! We need pics of the in-progress Solar system!

This coming month is Pinewood Derby building month for my son and I: Milling Machine time!

[KRSESQ]

How pressed for time are you? It would be fun to build an orrery.

Kevin

[Gurm]

Yeah, Logan wanted to do his solar system model "to scale", I had to point out that his room wasn't big enough, and we went with the glow-in-the-dark model from Discovery, and I worked out a logarithmic scale that made SOME sense...

[Dr Mordrid]

Scale is out.....we'd need to use the football field, at the least.

[VJ]

Building it to scale is an idea!

Just bring a basketball: "This is the sun. All the other planets are so small, you just can't see them (but they are there!). ".

[Kruzin]

Have him bring in his hot teen female cousin to pole dance on the rig.
You won't mind the exploitation for extra points.

[KRSESQ]

Building it to scale is an idea!

Just bring a basketball: "This is the sun. All the other planets are so small, you just can't see them (but they are there!). ".

Except that he'd need the entire football field to display the sun and just the inner planets (and I'm not even sure Mars would fit!).

Kevin

[High_Jumbllama]

Size Calculator http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/

[VJ]

Except that he'd need the entire football field to display the sun and just the inner planets (and I'm not even sure Mars would fit!).

It was a joke, to minimize the work to be done...
(ok, a bad joke)

[KRSESQ]

It was a joke, to minimize the work to be done...
(ok, a bad joke)

That's okay. Mine was a bad joke too. and my calculations were a bit off. Inner solar system would fit. Jupiter, not so much.

Kevin