11km wide solar system replica built by space wizards in Nevada Desert (VIDEO)
A pair of space buffs has descended on Nevada's Black Rock Desert in a bid to correctly demonstrate the size of our solar system. Pushing the boundaries of imagination, they managed to create a mesmerizing scale model using only marbles and light bulbs.
Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh and have made a short movie about their adventure. They said they were disturbed by images that portray the distances in the solar system inaccurately.
“There is literally not an image that adequately shows you what it actually looks like from out there [space],” Overstreet noted.
The only way to create an authentic model to scale was to build one themselves, the two friends decided.
When they arrived at the dry lake bed in Black Rock desert, they gave themselves only 36 hours to create a model, spiced up with the planets' orbits animated at night through lights. The idea was to create a time-lapse to show how big the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Mars really are.
“To create a scale model with an Earth only as big as this marble, you need seven miles [11kms] of empty space,” Overstreet said in the film.
READ MORE: Dark side of Saturn: NASA releases new image of ringed planet at night
The real challenge was to capture Earth from the view of an astronaut. And they actually did it!
“That's what I really wanted to try and capture. We are on a marble floating in the middle of nothing. When you sort of come face to face with that, it’s staggering,” Overstreet wrapped up.
