I decided to visit the planet Neptune this winter. Imagine my surprise when I found it in Peoria, Illinois.
Actually, Neptune wasn't in Peoria proper, but just northeast, in the tiny town of Roanoke. Just northwest, in Kewanee, you can find Pluto, and once you get to Peoria itself, the seven other planets--Mercury straight through Uranus--start turning up.
The solar system I visited that day, of course, was not the genuine article. The genuine article is a little big for that. A tourist trying to get from, say, the sun to Pluto would have to travel 3.6 billion miles, and beyond I-95, a Ramada Inn and a Roy Rogers would be out of the question. Our own Earth and its neighbor Venus are separated by nearly 26 million miles of cosmic backyard. Pluto--which the average amateur astronomer couldn't find if it were wearing bicycle reflectors and Groucho glasses--is just 1,400 miles in diameter and lies nearly a billion miles from neighboring Neptune.
All this makes teaching cosmic cartography a bit of a problem. In a country in which most schoolchildren still think Lima is an objectionable legume and Cameroon a chewy coconut cookie, we clearly have a way to go before fully grasping our place in the universe. That's where Peoria--and Peorian Sheldon Schafer--comes in.
Schafer is a director of the Lakeview Museum and an instructor at Bradley University who for much of his career had despaired of conveying to students the enormity of the cosmos they were studying. Four years ago he decided that a scale model might help. Now, the ordinary solar system model is a familiar affair, typically consisting of nine tennis balls supported by nine wire hangers inside a black-painted cardboard box. As educational tools go, it's not bad--provided you accept that we live in a corrugated cosmos of fuzzy planets inscribed with the name Wilson. For his hometown, Schafer decided, he would provide something more.
