Diego loved to daydream During soccer practice he became a sports hero scoring the winning goal in the World Cup When he listened to music he saw himself performing in front of a sold-out arena At school he was a great scientist shaking hands with the King of Sweden as he received the Nobel Prize Before bed he’d look up at the stars and imagine himself as an astronaut exploring new worlds 5
Most of all Diego dreamed of being a great wizard with magical powers If his mom got sick he’d use his wizardry to cure her When he saw a kid bullying a friend he magically silenced the bully and made the bully feel what his friend felt When his uncle became a firefighter he put a magic invisible bubble around him so he couldn’t be hurt But his latest daydream was about a much bigger job He wished more than ever before to be a real wizard because someone needed to save the world 6
Diego hadn’t always thought about the whole world When he was younger he didn’t think about much beyond his family friends and neighborhood As he got older he began to realize that he was part of a much bigger world Still big as our world may seem in school he learned that it looks tiny and fragile when seen against the blackness of space Our entire planet Earth is smaller than a sunspot on the Sun and small enough to be swallowed up in a storm on Jupiter Earth is so small that if Diego became a giant wizard and held the Sun and planets in his hands he’d need to take great care not to lose it Visualizing Earth The painting shows our wizard with the Sun and planets at their correctly scaled sizes As you can see Earth is indeed much smaller than a sunspot and smaller than the storm on Jupiter known as the Great Red Spot The painting does not show the orbits of the planets on the same scale The reason is that planets are really tiny compared to their orbits To show the planet orbits on the same scale as the planet sizes we’d need to make the orbits more than a thou sand times as big as they are in the painting You can get a better sense of what space really looks like by visiting a scale model of the solar system such as the Voyage model in Washington DC photo below There the Sun is the size of a large grapefruit while Earth is smaller than the ballpoint in a pen and is 15 meters 49 feet from the model Sun As Diego learned Earth really does look tiny and fragile in the vastness of space The Voyage model The gold ball on the nearest pedestal is the Sun and the other pedestals hold the planets To learn more about Voyage visit www voyagesolarsystem org 7
