In The Field

AAS DPS 2008: Jogging the planets

planet.jpg If you didn’t realize it, Ithaca was a good place for DPS. Cornell put on a concert for the planets. The art museum has a special Saturn exhibit going. But one of my favorite things is down the hill from Cornell: the planet walk. Named in honor of Carl Sagan, the planet walk was unveiled in 1997, but has a slightly retro, 1970s feel to it. A little hokey, but endearingly earnest and fun nonetheless. You start at the heart of the Ithaca Commons, downtown, with a concrete monument to the sun, adorned with factoids. A circular hole within the monument sets the scale: that is the diameter of the sun, at one 5-billionth of its size. The planets, each with their own monument, stretch out from there, their distances based proportionately on their orbits. I decided to go for a jog out to Pluto, to really get a sense of the solar system’s scale.

The inner planets all lie within a block. Jupiter, the size of a silver dollar in its sun-sized hole, sits by the famous vegetarian Moosewood Restaurant a couple blocks away. Saturn, its plastic all scratched up, is further out, in front of the Tompkins County library. I only had to run for less than 10 minutes to get this far, but the next stages of the jog were daunting. Uranus was in a little residential park, Neptune out along a canal that leads to Lake Cayuga. Pluto, finally, was tucked away by Ithaca’s “Sciencenter” a mile or two away (it seemed like billions and billions), a perfect resting place for our favorite dwarf planet (Sciencenter staff said that they would be updating Pluto’s factoids to reflect the current controversy). And with the conference over, I could use some rest myself. Ithaca was wonderful. If, as Sagan said, the universe was bigger than anything anyone has dreamed of, then Ithaca was my cozy little solar system for nearly a week. Until next time, Eric.

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