2 min read

Drawing the Solar system

Table of Contents

Visualizing the Solar system

An interesting fact about the Solar system is that since the orbits of the planets are nearly coplanar, we can draw a faithful picture of the relative angles of the planets to the sun on a two-dimensional plane.

This surprising fact is what inspired me to create the following visualization of the Solar system, which is updated every time this page is loaded:

While the size of the planets is merely for illustration and is not to scale, the distance of the planets to the sun is accurate on a logarithmic scale and the angles between the planets and the sun correspond exactly to the angles of the night sky.

About the code

Since this project is open-source, the relevant code for this visualization is available here.