If you’ve ever seen an illustration of the solar system, the odds are good that it was wrong. Not that it messed up the order of the planets, but that the scale was completely off. "Every single ...

Starting with an Earth the size of a marble, these folks built a full-scale model of our solar system across 7 miles of Nevada desert.

To show what our solar system truly looks like, DIY enthusiasts Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh had to drive to a gigantic dry lakebed in Nevada and build a scale model there.

Another way is to build a scale model in the real world. Real world solar system models can be found in lots of places, the one that inspired us was the Maine solar system model.

Those proportions are kept honest in the scale model, in which an Earth that's only the size of a small marble calls for a solar system that's 7 miles wide.

What the project really gets at is just how important scale is. In order to make a diagram of our solar system easy to read, one with to-scale orbits has inflated planet size.

A pair of filmmakers visited a dry lake bed in Nevada to build what they describe as the first-ever scale model of the solar system.

Get your scrolling hand ready. An interactive web page has created a scale model of the solar system, where the moon is the size of just one pixel.

Still from "To Scale: The Solar System," a 7-minute video that shows the construction of a scale-model solar system in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

Still from "To Scale: The Solar System," a 7-minute video that shows the construction of a scale-model solar system in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. (Image credit: Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh) ...