Photo from the Register Guard 1990.

The sun we painted on the ground is visible behind our heads.

This project started in 1990, when my son was in 4th grade. The project grew out of a desire to show my son the reality of the relative smallness of the planets, and the great distances between them. No book or movie can adequately create express this concept.

I suggested to my son that we make an accurate scale model of the solar system. We decided to paint the model on the ground, and settled on a scale that made the diameter of the earth equal to 1/2 inch, which made Pluto 3.7 miles from the sun. Not too big, and not too small.

We got out a map, laid the planets out along a bike route near our house, and started measuring and painting. It turned out to be a way bigger deal than we ever expected. The nicest thing was all the people who would talk to us while we worked on the project. People really liked it.

Don Bishop, columnist for the Eugene Register Guard wrote about the project and the story was picked up by the Associated Press. Articles about our model were sent to us from newspapers as far away as Houston, Texas, and Boston, Massachusetts. A California radio station did a live interview with my son and me. All this for a model created with $20 worth of paint that the weather erased in a few months.

For the next couple of years I kept thinking about how I could make a better model that would last.