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Pluto, 984 metres away

Otford and the Solar System Model: A Description by Geoff King

Promising to lead a rambling club walk to cover millions of miles is not an everyday opportunity, but that is what Otford Parish Council provided for all visitors when they built the Millennium model of the Solar System.

This scale model is set within the playing field alongside the village car park.  At the very centre of the model sits a shining silver orb 10" in diameter representing the sun.  Our walk starts at this point and in 32 metres (Sorry, 88 million miles), the Earth is reached, a mere blob 2.79mm in diameter (See drawing below) set atop a plinth also showing the moon, a minute pinpoint just an inch or so from Earth.  All the other planets are scattered at the same scale at points in the playing field and surrounding area – some are a mile or so away.

Standing in space, so to speak, one asks if any member would care to guess how far the nearest stars are to be found at the same scale to the model sun?  Would it be, say, in nearby Sevenoaks two miles away?  Or perhaps even further, say in London twenty miles away?  The awesome truth is that another orb, (about 10" in diameter) representing Proxima Centaur, is sitting in the Griffith Observatory, 5000 miles away in Los Angeles and the next nearest star Sirius, is sitting in the Sidney Observatory, Australia, 11,000 miles away!

When awestruck members looked down on Mother Earth, this blob, no bigger than a small ball bearing isolated in the vastness of space, they were asked to contemplate that if they were to walk ten miles once a week for fifty years, they would just about circumnavigate the blob, all 2.79mm of it!

To visit the Otford model is a profound and thought provocative experience, combined with a ramble on the lovely nearby hills is indeed a memorable event.