In my scale, the sun is the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, and the Earth is the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
Solar Systems are so big that it’s impossible for someone to even imagine how big or how far apart the planets are. So, to better understand the distances between the planets, we used a scale that’s much easier to understand.
1 AU (Astronomical Unit) is the distance between the sun and the earth. Based on this, we can use AU’s to understand the distance between the sun and other planets, such as Mercury being .387 AU and Venus being .722 AU.
In my scale, the sun is the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, and the Earth is the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The distance between the two structures is 4.62 km, so that means 1 AU in my scale = 4.62 km.
From this, I multiplied 4.62 x the AU of a planet to find the how far away the planet is from the sun on my scale. (Example for Mercury- 4.62 x 0.387 = 1.79, so the distance Mercury would be from the Notre-Dame Cathedral (the sun) is 1.79 km.)
I thought this was a cool project, because I always found it hard to picture anything in space because of how big it was, and this project shrunk it to a scale I can understand.