My Old Solar System Model

I've recently been clearing up my room, and in my closet I found an old model of the Solar System that I made myself for a science project in secondary school. I've decided to throw it away, but before I do I'd like to write a bit about it as it's still one of my favourite projects I've ever done.

I finished this project on April 12, 2021, and if my memory serves me correctly we had about 2 weeks to do it. The project was simply to make a model of our Solar System. It didn't exactly have to be to scale or anything, and it only had to feature the Sun and eight planets (I forget if Pluto too, though I did include it).

However, due to me being a massive astronomy nerd all my life, and more specifically my obsession with The Scale of the Universe (plus Kurzgesagt and Wait But Why's then-relatively new Universe in a Nutshell app), I wanted to make it as close to actual scale as I could. I also included small blocks of text that briefly described each object and included some fun facts, which were blatantly taken from The Scale of the Universe (though I wrote a lot of the information myself).

The base of the model was a black cardboard trifold, and the planets and moons were all made out of styrofoam spheres that I cut in half. Unfortunately, since they didn't come in that many sizes, they aren't as accurately to scale as I would've liked, but they're close enough and objects with similar sizes are the same size in the model (i.e., the Earth and Venus). I painted these as best as I could to match the actual bodies (except Triton and Pluto for some reason), and for Saturn's rings I cut a large ring of cardboard and folded it on. I then wrote the information (probably just off the top of my head) on my computer and printed them out, and then stuck them along with the spheres onto the trifold. I then painted on the Asteroid Belt and The Sun, handwrote a few more labels, and it was done!

In the end it looked like this:

The project was quite sloppy — I feel like all of my projects were for years — but I am still quite happy with it, and can't help but look back on it fondly.

If I made it nowadays I obviously would've done a lot of things differently, especially with my precision and writing/information (so many mistakes…), but I still had a lot of enthusiasm and ambition for the project, and I had a lot of fun making it, both during planning and execution!

I am definitely able to do much better things now, things that I am truly proud of without qualification, but this project serves as a sort of landmark for me. It shows how much I've improved over the years, and yet it also shows I've kept the same level of ambition and excitement for making things as I always have, which is one of the things I am truly the proudest of in my life.

I also found a lot of photos from when I was actually working on it, behind-the-scenes, if you will. One of them is the header image of this post, but I am going to leave 6 additional images here!

• Image 1: The printed info boxes [Date: Apr 8, 9:41:10 AM]
• Image 2: Me holding a lopsided styrofoam sphere [Date: Apr 10, 9:03:39 AM]
• Image 3: All the spheres cut to their correct sizes [Date: Apr 10, 9:32:21 AM]
• Image 4: The first batch of spheres painted [Date: Apr 11, 2:04:07 PM]
• Image 5: All spheres except Jupiter painted [Date: Apr 11, 10:27:49 PM]
• Image 6: All the objects are finished! [Date: Apr 12, 3:37:54 PM]