To Scale: The Solar System from Wylie Overstreet on Vimeo.
On a dry lakebed in Nevada, a group of friends build the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits: a true illustration of our place in the universe.
A film by Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh
alexgorosh.com
wylieoverstreet.comCopyright 2015
When my daughters were young we spent a lot of time looking at the sky. Comets, meteor showers, constellations, satellites, planets. On camping trips, especially; but sometimes we juat went out into the country to find dark places so we could see better.
Laying in the dew-wet grass, or bundled in winter coats on the still-warm hood of the car, we’d listen to the whippoorwills, the crickets and katydids, the owls, and distant trains, and look up into the big dark and empty that seems so full when the sky is clear.
In elementary school they made models for science projects, and posters. We used flashlights for the sun, and basketballs and baseballs for planets, and we tried to get our heads around the scale of things.
We are not alone, it seems. These guys did that, too, and tried to make it real on a much bigger scale. It’s beautiful on many levels.