So for anyone who is unaware, there is a bike/pedestrian path between Moscow and Pullman called the Bill Chipman Palouse Trail. Completed in 1998, it is an approximately seven mile long trail that starts near the intersection of Bishop Boulevard and Main Street in Pullman and ends at the intersection of the Pullman-Moscow Highway and Perimeter Drive in Moscow. A decade or so (?) ago, a little scale model of the solar system was set up on the Moscow side, where the sun was placed at the terminal end of the trail and each planet was placed an appropriate distance from this little model sun, ending with Pluto and the other dwarf planets near Warbonnet Drive.

This gives you a good idea of the distance between all the planets, but as I was running this morning, I wondered what this model would look like if it extended the entire length of the trail. That is, if the sun was placed where it currently is (at the Moscow end), but Pluto and the other dwarf planets were placed at the Pullman end, how would the spread of the planets look over these seven miles?

So I made a map! This is what that model would look like with the sun at the “mile 0” marker and Pluto/dwarfs at the “mile 7″ marker. Distances:

• Mercury: 0.069 miles from the sun
• Venus: 0.128 miles from the sun
• Earth: 0.177 miles from the sun
• Mars: 0.269 miles from the sun
• Jupiter: 0.922 miles from the sun
• Saturn: 1.698 miles from the sun
• Uranus: 3.403 miles from the sun
• Neptune: 5.334 miles from the sun
• Pluto/dwarfs: 7 miles* from the sun

And a picture, because that makes it so much easier to see.

I think that gives an even better representation of the vast distances between those outer planets. Also, it’s kind of cool that the Washington-Idaho border sits where the Asteroid Belt would be.

WOO!

*This is super approximate; there are obviously several inaccuracies when doing this in Google Maps in terms of getting the exact distances along that trail, AND I don’t remember if the “Pluto” marker is based on Pluto’s average distance from the sun, the average distance of the mentioned dwarf planets, or on something else.