Central Illinois Community Solar Model - Venus - Peoria, IL - Solar System Models on Waymarking.com

In Peoria, along a park walkway is a detailed model of Venus that is part of the Community Solar System model in Peoria.

The model is located in a park along the Illinois River, along the Pimiteoui Trail. It is exactly 1 mile away from the Peoria Riverfront Museum, which is in the center of the city and is the location of the sun. The model includes (or will include) not only the primary planets, but other bodies out to the Oort Cloud. Thus, the model stretches for many miles around Peoria. This solar model is an update to a previous model. The previous model was at one time the world's largest solar model, centered at the Lakeview Planetarium, which has since been closed and merged with the Peoria Riverfront Museum.

You could park at the museum and follow the trail northeast to the model. If you can't walk, you can drive northeast on NE Adams Street to Morton Street about 1 mile away, then turn right and drive to the parking lot at the end. The earth model is not far away from this location.

Venus is mounted within a metal cylinder with a glass-plexi window to see the planet. There is also a sign at the bottom with more information. The planet itself is painted in subtle hues of yellow to show the clouds that shroud the planet. It is 4.8 inches in diameter.


"You have reached the planet
VENUS
Venus is called Earth's "sister planet." Both are nearly identical in size, mass, and interior structure. Venus' thick, toxic atmosphere traps heat in a runaway "greenhouse effect." The temperature is nearly 900 degrees F and atmpospheric pressure 90 times that of Earth. The clouds contain concentrated sulfuric acid. Venus has a slow, backwards rotation, so the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east 58 Earth-days later.
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The Central Illinois Community Solar System is a scale model with both size and distance to the same scale. (99,000,000:1) The 46' sun is on the Sun Plaza at the Peoria Riverfront Museum. Learn more at PeoriaRiverfrontMuseum.org."

The museum web site has the following about the model:

"The current Community Solar System is the most complete large-scale model of the solar system in the world! The museum's solar system model is scaled to the size of the planetarium and stretches over 2,000 square miles in central Illinois, making this the most complete large-scale solar system model in the world. "

Address: Off Morton Street Pimiteoui Trail Peoria, IL United States of America 61602 To-Scale by distance: yes To-Scale by Size: yes Is the model an Orrery?: no Web Page: [Web Link] Hours: Daylight Admission Fee: 0.00 (listed in local currency)

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