Solar System Lab
Every body this volume carries, in one scene: the Sun, the eight planets, five dwarf planets and twenty-one moons. Nothing here is arranged by hand — positions come from published orbital elements, shapes from measured radii, tilts from measured poles, and where a body has no surface map it is drawn in a colour whose brightness comes from its measured albedo rather than from anybody’s taste.
The Solar System, and everything in it
The Sun, eight planets, five dwarf planets and twenty-one moons. Tap any of them for its numbers, open one to fly round it and its moons, or switch the camera to roam and go wherever you like. Drag to turn; scroll to zoom.
14 bodies, drawn from measured radii, measured pole directions and published orbital elements. The Sun at the centre, radius 6,95,700 km. Textured with a pre-built surface map. The photosphere, rendered as a surface. The Sun has no surface — this is the depth at which it stops being transparent. Mercury: 0.35 au from the Sun, below the ecliptic plane. Radius 2,441 km. Textured with a pre-built surface map. Built from MESSENGER monochrome imagery with colour applied. Mercury really is close to grey; the contrast is not. Venus: 0.72 au from the Sun, below the ecliptic plane. Radius 6,052 km. Textured with a pre-built surface map. Venus's surface under 90 bar of cloud has never been photographed from orbit. This is radar altimetry with colour applied — what the ground is shaped like, not what it looks like. Earth: 0.99 au from the Sun, in the plane of the ecliptic. Radius 6,378 km. Textured with a pre-built surface map. Cloudless, which is a choice. There is no day on which Earth looks like this from space. Mars: 1.59 au from the Sun, above the ecliptic plane. Radius 3,396 km. Textured with a pre-built surface map. Colour-balanced from Viking-era imagery. Mars's true colour is a long-running argument among the people who take the pictures. Ceres: 2.65 au from the Sun, above the ecliptic plane. Radius 482 km, visibly flattened (0.075). Dwarf planet. Jupiter: 5.31 au from the Sun, above the ecliptic plane. Radius 71,492 km, visibly flattened (0.065), with rings out to 2,26,000 km that are invisible from Earth and are drawn faint. Textured with a pre-built surface map. A cloud-top map from one epoch. Jupiter's belts and the Great Red Spot visibly change from year to year. Saturn: 9.43 au from the Sun, below the ecliptic plane. Radius 60,268 km, visibly flattened (0.098), with rings out to 4,50,000 km. Textured with a pre-built surface map. Contrast enhanced. Saturn's banding is far subtler to the eye. Uranus: 19.43 au from the Sun, below the ecliptic plane. Radius 25,559 km, visibly flattened (0.023), with rings out to 98,000 km that are invisible from Earth and are drawn faint. Textured with a pre-built surface map. Uranus is nearly featureless in visible light. Any structure you can see here has been stretched into visibility. Neptune: 29.88 au from the Sun, below the ecliptic plane. Radius 24,764 km, visibly flattened (0.017), with rings out to 43,900 km that are invisible from Earth and are drawn faint. Textured with a pre-built surface map. Voyager 2's blue is partly a filter choice. The dark spot it photographed has since gone. Pluto: 35.66 au from the Sun, below the ecliptic plane. Radius 1,188 km. Dwarf planet. Haumea: 49.75 au from the Sun, above the ecliptic plane. Radius 1,161 km, visibly flattened (0.558), with rings out to 2,357 km that are invisible from Earth and are drawn faint. Dwarf planet. Makemake: 52.74 au from the Sun, above the ecliptic plane. Radius 715 km. Dwarf planet. Eris: 95.45 au from the Sun, below the ecliptic plane. Radius 1,163 km. Dwarf planet. Moons are not drawn at this scale — the widest of them spans a thousandth of the distance to its planet's neighbour. Open a planet to see them. Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, Eris are drawn as shaded spheres in an approximate colour, because no surface map ships for them.
Sizes exaggerated 1,000x relative to distances, so the bodies are visible. Switch to true scale to see the real proportions — at true scale most of them become smaller than a pixel, which is the point. The Sun is the one exception: at that factor it would be drawn wider than Mars's orbit and would swallow the inner planets, so it is capped just inside Mercury's — which is why Jupiter's disc looks bigger than it. The panel gives every true radius in kilometres.
The Sun
| Equatorial radius | 6,95,700 km |
|---|---|
| Flattening, drawn | 0.00000 — one radius stored, so drawn as a sphere |
| Mass | 1.00 M☉ |
| Mean density | 1,408 kg/m³ |
| Surface gravity | 274.00 m/s² |
| Escape velocity | 617.70 km/s |
| Rotation period | 609.12 hours |
| Mean temperature | 5,772 K |
| Composition | H 91.8%, He 7.8% — by volume, and there is nothing else it could be a composition of: the Sun is atmosphere all the way down. |
| Magnetic field | A global field that reverses every eleven years, which is what the sunspot cycle counts. The stored dipole tilt is a snapshot of something that does not hold still, and no single number describes it. |
| Rings drawn | none |
| Shown for | JD 2461342.0 TT |
What you are looking at: The photosphere, rendered as a surface. The Sun has no surface — this is the depth at which it stops being transparent.
Looking for the scrubable overview instead? The Astronomy chapters carry it, alongside the rest of the orbital-mechanics story.