When looking in a science textbook or a toy mobile of the solar system, it’s easy to depict the sun, planets and moon to scale in comparison to each other. What’s not so easy to visually comprehend the staggering distance that separates each planet on its individual orbit around the sun. Filmmakers Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet challenged themselves to build such a model and the result is this fascinating short film To Scale.

Starting with the Earth as the size of a marble, it turns out you need an area about 7 miles (11.2km) to squeeze in the orbit of the outermost planet, Neptune. The team used glass spheres lit by LEDs and some GPS calculations to map out the solar system on the dry bed of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Once nighttime arrived they shot a timelapse from a nearby mountain that accurately reflects the distance of each orbital path at a scale of roughly 1:847,638,000. Amazing.

If you have more questions about how they did it, here’s a brief making of clip. (via Colossal Submissions)

Ah the Aragon Ballroom. This is a fun listing for the old Rock ‘n’ Rollers that visit the Cool Album of the Day site. Here’s a list of just about ever show that was held at the Aragon Ballroom in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago.  If you went there, have fun looking thru this list.  Look for the shows that you saw. Feel ‘bummed’ about the ones you missed. Be angry about the ones that you would have checked out but you didn’t know about, until now.

I’ve combined different listings to form this list. I’ve even contacted band members and did poster research to find others. It’s the best list on the ‘net!

If you were never at the Aragon (it’s still up and running by the way.) it’s still fun to see the shows that were held at the 4500 capacity ‘brawl-room.’  In the old days that would put strung-together folding chairs on the floor. I think they just pack them in now.

Tell us your tales about the Aragon Ballroom below!

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