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Here's what happened when a group of friends built a scale model of the solar system in the desert

Guia Marie Del Prado,Jennifer WelshSep 19, 2015, 23:10 IST

Vimeo Screenshot

Google any image of the solar system and you'll find a photo of the planets bunched together around the sun.

But in reality, the solar system is extremely vast.

To get an idea of just how far that is, it would take about 4 hours to reach the furthest planet from the sun at the speed of light.

In the words of James Irwin, an astronaut on Apollo 15:

As we got farther and farther away, the Earth diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine ... seeing this has to change a man.

That quote is what inspired writer Wylie Overstreet and director Alex Gorosh to build a model of our solar system, to exact scale, in the middle of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.

Scroll down to see how they did it.