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Wow! I clicked on the Sun photo and saw our teeny tiny Earth even more clearly. The things I don't know! Thank you, Michael, for posting this.
Namaste.

we, the Earth, are actually immersed WITHIN GrandMother Sun, whose body is a spinning hurricane of fire, plasma, approximately 300AU in diameter ... 300 hundred times the distance of the Earth from the CENTER of GrandMother Sun, the CENTER of HER, the Solar System ...

visualize a photograph from above of a hurricane over the Pacific or Atlantic, then imagine it is fire, plasma, rather than cloud vapor -- and imagine it extending a hundred and fifty times further out into the galaxy than the Earth.

Mother Earth is essentially at the CENTER of that plasma hurricane ...

Wow, is the sun really that big? I was skeptical of solar energy before but now I'm all for it !!!

This is such a beautiful photo, so instructive.

To really get the whole thing in perspective, you have to consider the distance of Earth from the sun as well. I did some calculations once: to make a proper scale model, with everything in their correct proportions (both size and distance), you would have to use a regulation-size basketball court (90 feet). Then the sun would be the size of a basketball at one end of the court.... Earth would be a marble all the way at the other end.

Then, keeping everything in the same scale, the next nearest star would be over in England somewhere.......

Sorry, folks....

I re-crunched the numbers, and it turns out I slightly mis-remembered my former calculations......

Here is the real deal:

If you want to make a scale model with the sun the size of a basketball, then Earth would not be the size of a marble, but more like a BB -- a tenth of an inch or so in diameter. Earth and sun would then be separated by the length of a basketball court.

I realized my error by trying to include the moon in this picture. To include the moon, we start by making the Earth the size of a marble.... but then, to keep everything in proportion, the sun is an over-sized beach ball, some four feet in diameter. And the beach-ball is 120 yards away from the marble -- a football field plus the two end zones.

On that scale, the moon is the size of a BB, orbiting around the marble at a distance of fifteen inches.

That is way over my head!

Sspeaking of CLEAN RENEWABLE ENERGY, if you did take in the Eleventh Hour movie Saturday after Ojai Day
you saw a production as compelling as Gore's "An
Inconvenient Truth" with more of an urgent message.
The interdependent web of life we all rely on has
reached it's threshhold from contamination, witnessed
by the number of super storm systems we are seeing and
increasingly helpless to react to, like the fires.
With all the eco- friendly design for living features
Ojai has-bike and walking trails, open space and
managed growth, it lends itself to becoming a model
sustainable community to demonstrate alternatives to
traffic, pollution and exponential growth. Ojai day
and many of the outdoor programs downtown emphasizing
pedestrian friendly design are not only always hugely
popular but demonstrate sustainable community values
alive and working well.

Speaking of CLEAN RENEWABLE ENERGY, if you did take in the Eleventh Hour movie Saturday after Ojai Day
you saw a production as compelling as Gore's "An
Inconvenient Truth" with more of an urgent message.
The interdependent web of life we all rely on has
reached it's threshhold from contamination, witnessed
by the number of super storm systems we are seeing and
increasingly helpless to react to, like the fires.
With all the eco- friendly design for living features
Ojai has-bike and walking trails, open space and
managed growth, it lends itself to becoming a model
sustainable community to demonstrate alternatives to
traffic, pollution and exponential growth. Ojai day
and many of the outdoor programs downtown emphasizing
pedestrian friendly design are not only always hugely
popular but demonstrate sustainable community values
alive and working well.

"With all the eco- friendly design for living features
Ojai has..."

mostly agreed, Pete...one thought i had on Ojai Day was that whether or not the event itself was "green", at least there were oodles of people NOT driving around!

however, i think you opened up a perfect opportunity for me to share another impactful way that our City and Citizens can literally build eco-friendliness into our community:
the Planning Commission each year gives a Building Design Award (to whom? the designer, the builder?) based on...nothing. at least that's what i was told by the City: that there are no formal criteria for said award; simply the opinion of the Planning Commission.
now, i'm not getting down on the P.C. at all...i'm simply suggesting a monumental opportunity for our community to craft a criteria for such an award that includes green building practices! i forget the statistic exactly, but a major portion of the industry in this valley is construction...imagine if a significant number (all?) of the valley constructors were educated and hip to building green! it is also known that a massive amount of our energy use comes from buildings (garrr, i wish i had the numbers in front of me). here again, as in so many environmental/ecological challenges, the solutions exist already...we don't need to invent or reinvent anything...it's simply a choice, and that requires education and will.

case in point: the E' Bello structure (cutely called Politoville by many) in downtown Ojai. frankly, i like the design, how it's integrating into the existing decor, how open it is, etc. however, i'm nearly certain - based on observation - that it was not constructed of green materials nor with green design functionality. i'd LOOOOOVE for Mr. Polito or someone from McGillivray Construction to come on and tell me otherwise, or for Michael Lind to share that Ron just purchased a massive solar system from him, but i fear that they cannot. can we afford to keep building structures - even one - that are not friendly to our environment from the ground up?
just one more dirty building, just one more plastic bag, just one more cigarette, just one more war...

as T.S. Eliot said in "The Hollow Men":
"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a wimper."

Aren't there already California building codes that mandate energy standards for new construction?

Joe, i would certainly hope so (and i'm pretty sure you're right).

what i'm suggesting is that
a) even those codes could probably be more progressive, and
b) writing green values into the Building Design Award criteria would be another facet of the whole movement, taking it into a cultural arena.

We should each be sustainable individually, that means using our own bodies to travel, work, to recreate, if we each make that decision our community will thrive.

I believe that awards do exist among architects and builders. What do you mean by "more progressive"? Possibly some of these new construction projects going up could be required by law to install solar electric cells, even if it meant they would not make as much profit as they normally would.

I just love living here in this valley of ours. While breaking down the Ojai Day REC Solar booth I was talking with one of the other vendors and the couldn't tell me enough about how lucky I was to actually be living in this town. They has about a two hour drive home and they were really jealous. Ojai truely is a wonderful place to live.

Quick update; houses built with solar command a premium and sell faster. Really "green" homes even more so.
There was a great series in the LA Times Real Estate section a couple of months ago, it's real, the data is in. Green is the new gold.

Now that we have everything in their proper proportions, let's set the model in motion, o.k.?

The actual Earth, orbiting around the sun, must hustle along at some sixty thousand miles per hour in order to complete a revolution in 365 days. That means we are constantly moving through space at some thousand miles per minute. We move through a distance equal to Earth's diameter about every eight minutes.

In terms of our model -- the marble separated from the four-foot beach ball at a distance of a football field -- the "Earth" moves about two yards per day in its orbit around the sun.

At the same time, of course, Earth is spinning around on its own axis of rotation. And is that axis nice and perpendicular, relative to the plane of Earth's orbit around the sun? No, it is not.... that is why globes you see are always tilted. Earth's axis of rotation (the line from north pole to south pole) is tilted at some 23 degrees from the plane of its orbit around the sun. And that tilt, my friends, is what creates the four seasons.... and is the reason why winter in the northern hemisphere is summer in the southern hemisphere.

Last but not least, let's bring in the moon.... You might think that the moon orbits around the Earth at any old angle, or all different angles, relative to the plane of Earth's orbit around the sun.... But it doesn't..... Moon orbits the Earth in a plane very near to the plane of Earth's orbit around the sun.... only off by about five degrees.... and when the two planes intersect, as they do from time to time, we get the possibility of lunar and solar eclipses....

Excellent description David. To go one step further, the Sun's velocity is approximately 217/km per second and takes 220-250 million years to complete one revolution around the center of the galaxy. Thus, all of the planets are sprialing behind the Sun as it races thru space 26,000 light years from the center of the galaxy. Occasionally, the earth's orbit takes it in front of the Sun...

The Sun has two counter rotating electromagnetic fields. The Sun comprises 99.86 percent of the mass of the Solar System.