 If you're following this solar system project in the last video, you've just seen that we've got our planets in line and we made them to scale. In this video, we're going to take it one step further, and we're going to create the relative distances between those planets. And that's going to be incredibly difficult to do on the screen, so we're going to jump over to Google Earth for a helping hand. And we're going to use where you're located to build your understanding of the relative distances between the planets in our solar system. And if you're a teacher, educator, or even a homeschooling parent and you're searching for some printable solar system worksheets, then go check the link in the description where I've got some resources that you can use for your group of learners. Alright, let's jump in our rocket ship and let's go check out the relative distances between the planets in our solar system. Hello world, it's the Serping Scratcher here, teacher-server programmer, and on this channel, I help curious learners just like you along on your learning journeys. This video is part of a series on creating a digital scale model of the solar system. Go check the card in the top right hand corner right now or links in the description for starter projects and links to other videos. We're pretty pumped about this video because we're going to be using Google Earth to visualize the distances between the planets because it's really hard to do. And I reckon if we start with where you live and your locations and we build it out from there, you're going to leave this video with a really good understanding of the relative distances and sizes of the planets in real life. So in a moment, we're going to jump across the browser and head over to Google Earth. Then once we've done our work on Google Earth, we're going to take some screenshots and come back into Scratch and we're going to create a digital version of the work that we've just done in some little animations for our little application here of the solar system digital model. Okay, so let's head over to Chrome Browser. Okay, I'm just across here in the browser and I've got a few tabs open. In this series, we've been using some data from NASA. So we've been using this planetary fact sheet in metric values. And I went ahead and created a Google sheet version of this and there's a link to that in the description down below if you want to check that out. But what we're going to be doing today is opening up a new tab and I suggest you use Chrome Browser for this one. And you want to look for Google Earth because that's what we're going to be using. So click on Google Earth and it'll come to the landing page and you want to launch it. Awesome. Now Google Earth has launched and what I'd like you to do is rotate the globe around. And I'm just clicking and dragging here and find where you are located. Now I am over here in the Southern Hemisphere down in Australia. I'm zooming in. Wow, the mouse is pretty much on point there. I'm in a place called Melbourne. We're going to be using Melbourne as our example in this video. But I want you to use a location that you're super familiar with a quick disclaimer because we're here on the internet. It doesn't make sense to use your house. Use the city that your house is in. And if you're wondering how I zoomed into this, I just use the mouse wheel on my mouse. You can also use the controls down here to zoom in and out. Now that we've got our city selected, I want you to zoom in even further and select a pretty well known landmark. The landmark that I'm going to select, I'm going to zoom into it because it's around that time of year when I'm recording this video. It's when the Australian Open is on. So I'm actually going to go to a Rod Lever Arena. I'm hoping that a few of you are familiar with that and I've seen some tennis games at the Australian Open. So I'm just going to zoom in for you to show you where Rod Lever Arena actually is. And there we are. This white structure, this is Rod Lever Arena with its roof closed. You can see all these tennis courts surrounding Rod Lever Arena. This initial landmark, this is going to represent the sun. This is our starting point. So in your project, I want you to pick that familiar central point because it's going to be our sun. Okay, so let's add in our first landmark. To do that, we go down here at the bottom left hand corner. We add a place mark. And I'm actually going to not put it in the center because there's a little quirk with Google Earth that if we're too zoomed in, it won't show the landmark because it's under a roof here. So I'm just going to pop the landmark to the southeast and going to name it sun. We're starting a new project. New project and I'm going to call it solar system distances. And we're going to save that and you might get bombarded with a pop up up here. Just close that one down and then we have it. There's our sun. Now we're going to switch back to our planetary fact sheet tab. We're going to focus our attention on the distance from sun row here. I'm going to plot all these distances into this row onto our map. Here it's got this 10 to the 6 kilometers. You might be wondering what this means. I'm just going to quickly jump across the sketchbook to explain it. Okay, we're now over here in the sketchbook and I'm just taking a little slice of our fact sheet here and we're interested first in this value distance from the sun. We've got this 10 to the 6 here. So what does that actually mean? Well, the 6 up here is just an exponent and the exponent refers to how many times we've multiplied 10 by itself. So here we've multiplied 10 by itself 6 times. So 10 times 10. And when we do that 10 times 10 is 100 times 10 is 1000 times 10 is 10,000 times 10 is 100,000 times 10 is actually 1 million. So the 6 just refers to the number of zeros that we've got. Cool. So we focus on the earth that is 149.6 million kilometers or just represented in the long form like that. But they've got this nice number here just 149.6. So how can we end up at that number? Well, what this number is actually saying is it's 149.6 times 10 to the 6 or 1 million. So to get rid of the 10 to the 1 6, all we need to do is divide by 1 million. To perform this calculation, it might be a little tricky. So let's just start with some basic things first. So let's just say we had 100 here. We want to split that 100 into 10 equal parts. Well, we know that if we divide 100 by 10, the result is 10, right? The way that we can show that is just by cancelling zeros and we had left with 10 over 1, which is just the same thing as 10. We could do the same thing if we had 1000 divided by 10. We could just cancel out the zeros and we know that would equal 100. We can do the same thing if we had 10,000 divided by 10. Again, we just cancel out the zeros and we left with 1000. So whatever number we have down here, we can cancel out the number of zeros from the top. So zeros cancel out. Nice and easy like that. Now we get to this point where we can't cancel out the zeros anymore. But what we're doing is we're not just removing the zeros. We're moving the decimal point. The decimal point right now is here, but we're actually cancelling out this number. We're not interested in it. So this decimal point is just going to shift across to there. So the number will be 149.6 if we divide it by 1 million. So that's how that works out. So that's got us to a point of 149.6 kilometers. But this is still quite a large number to represent on our map. We need to reduce this down even further. I want this number to be really friendly with my mind. So I actually want to convert this into meters. But I know if we convert this into meters right now, it's still going to be a really large number. So we need to reduce it even further. Okay, before we move ahead, I just want to give you some context of why we're doing this and we're reducing the numbers down. We want to be able to measure the distances on our Google Maps. So we want the distances to be somewhere within our city. So that's why we're reducing them down. And I also want to draw your attention to the diameter. Whatever we do to the actual distance from the sun, we also need to do it to the diameter so that we can keep the relationship between the actual distance and the diameter relative to each other. So right now, we've just divided our actual distance by 1 million and we need to do the same thing to the diameter value. The cool thing is that they're both in kilometers. So that's going to work out nice. So now we just need to divide 12,756 by 1 million. And that's going to end up at 0.012756. Don't forget the kilometers. Okay, I'd like to move this value into the meters now. We can do that is by using our little conversion table here. We know that there are 1000 meters for every kilometer. So all we need to do is multiply 149.6 kilometers by those 1000 meters. And just like those zeros cancel out, those kilometers are going to cancel out. We can just multiply this. And when we multiply it, all we're doing is moving the decimal place, the number of zeros that we have here. So this is going to turn out to be 149,600 meters. Now, if we just multiplied our actual distance by 1000, we need to do the same thing for our diameter. So we need to increase our diameter by three spots. So it'll be 123 and that's going to end up at 12.756 meters. All right, this value is still very, very far away. And so what I'd like to do now is just basically use these numbers that are in our table and just think of them as meters. Let's get this value back down to 149.6 instead of kilometers. It's going to be meters. And this is going to look the same, but that's going to greatly affect our diameter. So let's do that now. We'll divide this by 1000. And when we divide this by 1000, we're shifting the decimal place back three spots right there. So that's going to bring us to 149.6 meters. We're going to do the same thing up here. We're going to divide by 1000. And that means we're going to make it smaller. So we're going to go one, two, and three. So there's going to be a zero in here. And we're back at that starting value, 0.012756 meters. Now I'm looking at this and when does this end, man? Well, so this is quite a small number, but we can convert it into centimeters to make it a little bit more understandable and relatable. So to convert a meter into centimeters, we know that there are 100 centimeters for every meter. So all we need to do is multiply this value by 100 and we'll end up with the centimeters because we want a larger number, right? So when we're multiplying it, we're going to end up with a larger number. So we're shifting the decimal place two spots for the number of zeros. So we're going to end up at 1.2756 centimeters. And you might be wondering, do we need to do the same thing to our distance? We don't because all we've done here is convert the units. They still have a direct one-to-one relationship and all we've done different here is just change the units of the diameter. So now we're going to represent our actual distance in meters and we're going to represent our diameters or our sizes in centimeters. Let's jump back across to Google Earth. Okay, so for your convenience and mine as well, I've just gone ahead and created a new sheet here in our Google sheet of those values that we're going to be using. So we've got our distance from the sun now in meters and our diameters here in centimeters. And I've just used a little formula to help figure that out. So the first planet that we need to focus on is Mercury. Mercury is 57.9 meters away from our center. And so back over here in Google Earth, I hope you've still got it open. We can grab the ruler tool here on the left-hand side and we can start the point from the center of our sun. Remember, this is just an approximation and we can measure that distance of 59.7 meters. So I'm just going to get that as close as I can. Not going to be exact. And look, that's looking pretty good right there. And then just to get rid of that, I'm just going to double click it. So we've got that marker and this is going to be a little bit hacky to put in a new place mark here. And the way that I'm going to do this is when we want to add it the ruler measurement goes away from the screen. It leaves us. So I'm just going to edge that marker pretty close to this on-screen element here. And then I'm going to add a new place mark and I'm just going to pop it in the corner. So it's just an approximation. It's pretty close. We know that this is going to be Mercury. I'm going to save it to our solar system distances project. And now we've got Mercury in there, which is pretty neat. We just go back to our planetary fact sheet and you can see here that I've just put in some visuals of what the diameter size might look like. And for Mercury, it's about half a centimeter and that's the size of a popcorn kernel. So what you could go ahead and do is just Google something like that or if you've got something else that you would like to use that is half a centimeter, then Google that. It's like half your fingernail. I'm just going to type in popcorn kernel and look at the images here and I'm just going to click on one like this going to save that image as in our images folder and call it popcorn kernel. So that saved. I can head back across to Google Earth now and I can over here in the left-hand side edit my marker and I can add an image. So I've just gone back to finder. I'm going to grab that image head across back to Chrome Google Earth and drag it in there and there you go. You can add some information here. So the relative size of Mercury is about the size of popcorn kernel. Press back and when we click down here, if we were at Rodelaver Arena and we were standing, what's that? About 50 meters away from the sun, the size of Mercury with that distance would be about the size of a popcorn kernel and when you click on it, that information comes up which is kind of neat and that's it. We now have our algorithm to build out the rest of these planets. We would go back to our fact sheet. We would check the distance. So the next one is Venus and we want 108.2. You would go down and get the ruler tool again. Start from the sun. Measure out 102. Just like that. Double click to get rid of it. Just position it. So you've got a marker to go off. Place the marker. Name the planet. Now that we've added that marker, we'll go in and edit it. I've already found an image for this one. Found some chickpea images. Go in and copy the text from Mercury if you want or just rewrite it. One thing I forgot to do when I grabbed the image in the last one was just find the image source because it's always good to reference it. So I just got a link there to the image source and to be a good digital citizen. I would always write image source just like that. So now we're going to go ahead and do that for the rest of the planets. Okay, I've gone ahead and added in all of the planets now the cool thing about Google Earth and this is just cool in of itself is that you can click on each of our planets here in the left hand sidebar and it will pop open the window with your bit of information there as well. It's quite cool to explore. If you go up here and press present, it will go into a full screen mode and you've also got a table of contents here, much like how you just saw in the left hand navigation where you can navigate to a particular planet. So my hope is that this will give you some really good visual understanding of the distances between these planets and the relative sizes according to this particular distance that we've scaled based on the mass that we did in this video. If you made it through like epic job because this one is a little bit tricky and it can meddle with your mind. I know I reached out to a friend just to double check my maths and hey, I still may have made a mistake. And if I have, I'll update the values down in the Google spreadsheet down below in the description. The last thing before we go is that I've also put in the sun, which wasn't in our fact sheet, but I've also gone and put a measurement in of that, a relevant size, which is just the width of a railway track or the height of Gary Coleman, which is about 1.4 meters. Gonna park this video here. In the next one, we're going to take screenshots of all of our planets here, basically iterating through all the planets, we'll take screenshots of them, we'll import them and create an animation to switch between them. So I'll see you in that video.