Gainesville Solar Walk: The Sun

Near the center of Gainesville, Georgia, a bronze sculpture marks the beginning of something ambitious: a scale model of the solar system stretched across walking paths through town. The Solar Walk was donated to the city by Lakeview Academy and begins here at the Sun. Every planet along the path is positioned at a distance proportional to its actual distance from the Sun, compressed to a human scale you can stroll in an afternoon.

It is the kind of installation that makes abstract astronomy tangible. Start here, and by the time you reach Neptune at the far end of the walk, you have crossed the equivalent of roughly two point eight billion miles, shrunk down to a few thousand steps.