A Sublime Solar System Sunday

Sunday mornings are, typically, meant for morning coffee with my feet up. I try my utmost to not think very much Sunday mornings, but rather enjoy the feeling of a hot coffee bringing me to life while I do something completely mindless, like watch the cat sleep.

This morning, however, my youngest son looked at me and asked me what we could do. He wanted to get Out of the House and Do Something, Now. I'm always all up for that. Of course, he had an ulterior motive - he wanted to stop and get a snack - but it didn't change the fact that he wanted to go do something.

I have routinely come across these small markers scattered throughout the city that clearly represent the planets of the solar system. I've always been intrigued by them and, judging by where I've come across them, have always assumed that they were place at a scale distance from some central point, with that point being the sun. So, off we went on a scavenger hunt to find them all.

We did not find them in order, but I will present them as such here. Let's begin with the sun.

All of the markers look like this. They have definitely been weathered through the years, and the text on the plaque is difficult to read, but it's easy to see that this is The Sun.

Next in line from the sun is Mercury. It is really difficult to read up close, so it is about impossible to read over the picture, but we discovered that each plaque is the same size, and the size represents the sun. Further, each plaque has a dot on it showing the size of the particular planet in relation to the sun. It's impossible to see with Mercury, or any of the four inner planets, but easier with the larger gas planets farther out.

Here is earth. Someone got hungry and took a chunk out of it.

You can see on the Jupiter plaque how the planet is represented in relation to the sun. Jupiter is pretty big. The sun is bigger.

All of the plaques are about the same. The plaque for Uranus was not at it's original spot, but was easy for me to find since I ride by it when I'm out on my normal lunchtime bike ride:

For some reason I had a rather difficult time finding Neptune; it was not where I was expecting it to be. Thankfully, my path took us by a creamery, so we stopped for milkshakes! That was a win. And then we found Neptune.

I will not bore with more picture of the same type thing. Instead, I placed all the plaques, along with a snapshot of the surrounding area, onto a Google Map, fed by GPS coordinates:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1l7RzFvwS9n07BznUm89PLVfF7ZRPb1wO&usp=sharing

All in all, a very good #sublimesunday. Thank you, @c0ff33a, for hosting!

(c) All images and photographs, unless otherwise specified, are created and owned by me.
(c) Victor Wiebe

About Me

Amateur photographer. Wannabe author. Game designer. Nerd. 
General all around problem-solver and creative type.

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