Today in my Science 9 Honours class we created a map of our solar system using Google Maps. We were each given two locations and we built a solar system around it (one location would be the sun and the other would be the earth). To do this we measured the distance location 1 and location 2 and multiplied it by the astronomical unit of the planet we wanted to place. Astronomical Units, or AU, is the average distance between the sun and the moon. So if I wanted to find the distance of Mercury from the sun, I would have to find the distance between the sun and earth in my solar system, and that was 210 km, and the AU of Mercury is 0.387 – 210 * 0.387 = 81.27 so I would have to place Mercury 81.27 km away from the “sun.” We did this for each of the planets.

-Nicholas Tang