Hidden Gem - Crystal Lake: Take a solar system tour in town
By KEVIN P. CRAVER – kcraver@nwherald.com
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| Mrs. Shute's sixth-grade science class stands around a model of the sun at Lundhal Middle School in Crystal Lake. The model is part of a scale solar system that is scattered throughout schools and parks in the city. (Justin Edmonds – jedmonds@nwherald.com) |
CRYSTAL LAKE – Douglas Adams appropriately described the cosmos in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” – it’s big.
To paraphrase the late British humorist, you won’t believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big space is. You may think it’s a long way down the road to the Raue Center or Starbucks, but that’s just peanuts compared to space.
However, hidden among the trees and fields of Crystal Lake’s schools and parks, a former resident’s Eagle Scout project gives curious people with a good set of walking shoes an idea of just how big it is.
Sprinkled among Districts 47 and 155 schools and Crystal Lake Park District land is a model of our solar system. Scout Jeffery Chamberlain in 1994 asked the groups for permission, and the response was enthusiastic.
“I wanted something that would last – something visible and tangible that people could learn from that wouldn’t disappear after a couple of months,” said Dr. Chamberlain, 33, now a family doctor in Grand Rapids, Mich.
Chamberlain built a beach ball-sized sun out of concrete and concrete posts with plaques representing Mercury through Pluto, which the International Astronomical Union concluded in 2006 is not actually a planet.
The model of the solar system is shrunk between 1 and 2 billion times.
Locations of the planets are not exact, based on the simple fact that Crystal Lake’s forefathers didn’t take orbital mechanics into account when they laid out the city’s open spaces.
The sun is a concrete sphere on the southeast corner of the Lundahl Middle School track, and the first five planets can be found on or near school grounds in a northward line.
Earth and the moon can be found about 245 feet north, the sizes of a pencil eraser and a dull pencil point, respectively. At this scale, the universe’s ultimate speed limit of light speed is about half-a-foot per second.
An adult starting at the sun can approximate it by taking one heel-to-toe step every two seconds. In 8 minutes, 19.2 seconds, you’ll reach Earth.
Mars is further north, and Jupiter can be found about 1,300 feet away from the sun by a playground.
Visiting the rest of Chamberlain’s solar system is going to require a bit of a walk, or if you’re a warp drive kind of person, a car ride.
Saturn can be found by the playground at Ladd Park, about 2,340 feet to the east. Uranus is a longer drive back down McHenry Avenue to Crystal Lake South High School’s theater entrance, and Neptune can be found by the flagpole at Bernotas Middle School, 1.4 miles from the sun up Route 14.
As for Pluto? Although it is no longer a planet, it still graces the entrance of West Elementary School, about 2.3 miles from Lundahl. Scientists reclassified it as an object in the Kuiper Belt, icy flotsam left over from the solar system’s creation.
“I’m starting to feel like an old person, who can say in my day we had nine planets, not eight,” Chamberlain said.
If Chamberlain’s model is not enough to show you just how big the universe is, a little bit of time, patience and a powerful calculator can.
Let’s start with Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun. Using Chamberlain’s baseline of 245 feet from the sun to Earth, Proxima would be a red dwarf softball 12,465 miles away. That’s half the circumference of Earth at the equator.
Let’s now assume that Chamberlain has enough concrete and free time to build a model of the Milky Way galaxy, 100,000 light years across and filled with 200 billion to 3 trillion stars, depending on which scientist you consult. Chamberlain’s model, with the galactic core at the Sun’s center, would stretch past Mars well into the asteroid belt.
Of course, there are billions of galaxies in the observable universe. But that requires a much bigger calculator, and way too much concrete.
