Solar System scale activity
In 2014-05, I was asked by Sagamore second grade teacher Ms. Quinn to help do something for the first grade and kindergarteners on Sagamore Space Day. I'd like to do what I proposed back in January, of imagining the real scale of the solor system, riffing off of, "How Big is the Solar System? | It's Okay to be Smart | PBS Digital Studios - YouTube".
I'm using an online solar system scale calculator to see what our solar system model can look like. Although the video serves science education by using metric units, I wonder if we should use US customary units instead? Using the scale chosen in the video, 1,264,000,000:1 (calculated from the video's stated 110 cm (4.3 inch) grapefruit = 1.39 million kilometer sun)!, we can comfortably get out to Saturn at 370′. A 5.5′ sun gets us Saturn at 470′ (the length of our field) and a scale of 1,600,200,000:1 , but I think I'll stick with their scale because they give us good size references (e.g. Mercury is only the width of just 4 human hairs).