SOLAR PERPLEXUS

    There is a new display at Asteropolis!

A bird's-eye view of Asteropolis, including the new Solar System display in the Sun Room, at top.

    I love astronomy, and consider the Solar System to be an object of awesome beauty and endless fascination, as is everything else in the Universe, for that matter.  So this is my loving if rather inaccurate portrait of the face of the vasty deeps, a representation just as aesthetic as the Mona Lisa, in my somewhat humble opinion.

Inside the sun-room, one finds real or imagined mappings of all known planets and major moons

    When one contemplates the endless detail and practically infinite size of the Universe -- of which the part that we can actually see is probably a vanishingly small fraction -- one gains a sense of perspective that makes all our terrestrial concerns seem petty indeed.

Saturn's main moons, with Uranus lurking on the left & Jupiter peeking around on the right.

    This display attempts to portray all the planets and moons of the Solar System which are large enough to be round. They are sized to a consistent scale and also are set to spin at consistent speeds.  The orbits shown are NOT to scale with the planets themselves but are only meant to show relative positioning.  At the scale the planets are shown, the orbits would be far too large to be contained within the sim.  The sun would be the size of the room containing them -- in fact, it IS the room.

9 Dwarf Planets of the Kuiper Belt:  Pluto, Orcus, Eris, Quaoar, 2002MS4, Salacia, Makemake, 2007OR10, & Sedna

    The distinction between planets and dwarf planets and moons is highly artificial and arbitrary.  Some of the "moons" of Jupiter and Saturn are actually larger than any of the inner "planets", including the Earth itself.  Pluto is placed at the inner edge of a speckled band intended to represent the Kuiper Belt, along with a number of other dwarf planets.  Pluto and its moon Charon share roughly the same orbital region with Orcus and its moon Vance, altho they are actually tilted in highly eccentric orbits that partly overlap with that of Neptune.
    As there are no accurate mappings of any of the Kuiper Belt planets beyond Pluto, I have applied invented textures which I hope are not too dissimilar to the reality.