Wednesday, October 19, 2011

This is only tangentially related to hockey

but it is definitely the coolest thing you will learn all month. (I'll get back to posting about actual hockey when things get less crazy at my real job).

So, the Ericsson Globe, right? In Stockholm, where the Rangers started their season off. You remember the place. You may even remember Sam or Al or Joe or someone telling you on the broadcast that it's the world's largest hemispherical building.

Here's what you didn't learn on the broadcast: that hemisphere represents the Sun, in the world's largest to-scale model of the solar system. The model is to scale in both size of body and distance. So, for example, there's some little metal sphere around 1.8 miles from the Ericsson Globe representing Mercury, and there's some 8-foot light-up acrylic ball on the other fucking side of the country representing Neptune. The model is 1:20,000,000 scale, and it spans almost all of Sweden. It includes the sun and all the planets, as well as other bodies in orbit such as dwarf planets, comets, and moons.

How fucking sweet is that?!?

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