The residents of Central Illinois (and cyberspace) have a chance to appreciate the vastness of space. They can visit the Lakeview Museum Community Solar System, a scale-model re-creation of the solar system. The difference here is the scale. This model of the solar system is roughly 60 miles wide in the state of Illinois and there are comets on six continents of the world. The Lakeview Museum Community Solar System had been a dream of Sheldon Schafer, the Director of Science Programs for Lakeview Museum in Peoria, Ill., for 15-20 years. Schafer said that Lakeview Museum Community Solar System is the world's largest, as listed in the Guinness Book of Records. Discover magazine has done an article on the model, as well. This unique model of the sun and its nine planets, in which both size and distance are represented on the same scale (42 ft. = l million miles or l metre = 140,000 km).

To Jupiter and Beyond. Lakeview Museum Director of Science Program Sheldon Schafer and Bradley University Computer Science major Isaac Foraker are standing beneath the model of Jupiter in Bradley's Olin Hall. They are posing with an 1890's-vintage brass telescope purchased by the University's founder, Lydia Moss Bradley.

To give an idea of the vastness, the Sun is located at Lakeview Museum and Neptune is located in Roanoke, Ill., 23 miles from the museum. However, changing 23 miles to feet and dividing that figure by 42 ft. = 1 million miles; this short distance represents 2,891.4 million miles in space. Schafer points out that the Community Solar System is just a part of their programs, "Here at the museum that means principally the astronomy education program, the planetarium, and the solar model. These are our biggest but we do have others, such as the telescope viewing."

How many pixels in a light year? Bradley junior Isaac Foraker combined C programming within HTML in order to accurately match the distances between the planets in our solar system with the scrolling space between the planets on the web site (http://www.bradley.edu/las/phy/solar_system.html).

The Community Solar System was a joint effort between Lakeview Museum and Bradley University's Physics Department. Mr. Schafer also says that Isaac Foraker, a junior majoring in Computer Science, from Los Angeles, California, has been writing a program for the World Wide Web for sharing this project with the entire world. The scale of solar system is preserved on the World Wide Web, with the distances between the planets on the computer screen being the same, in proportion, to the real thing. This "virtual solar system" can be found at: http://www.bradley.edu/las/phy/solar_system.html. Foraker is the Bradley Amateur Astronomy Club President and he has been involved off and on since November '95, with this project. According to Foraker, "Basically, linking is like making a telephone call and getting information transmitted to your computer." He said that the Internet and World Wide Web allows the sharing of information. For example, a person can search for a topic, and find out more about the subject. Foracker reports that a search for astronomy showed that there were more than 15,000 sources of information available on the World Wide Web.