Extraterrestrial skies celestial equator to the North and in 2029 the North Pole of Uranus will be nearly pointed at the Sun. None of Uranus's moons would appear as large as a full moon on Earth from the surface of their parent planet, but the large number of them would present an interesting sight for observers hovering above the cloudtops. The angular diameters of the five large moons are as follows (for comparison, Earth's moon measures on average 31′ for terrestrial observers): Miranda, 11–15′; Ariel, 20–23′; Umbriel, 15–17′; Titania, 11–13′; Oberon, 8–9′. Unlike on Jupiter and Saturn, many of the inner moons
Solar System model Solar System model Solar System models, especially mechanical models, called "orreries", that illustrate the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the Solar System have been built for centuries. While they often showed relative sizes, these models were usually not built to scale. The enormous ratio of interplanetary distances to planetary diameters makes constructing a scale model of the Solar System a challenging task. As one example of the difficulty, the distance between the Earth and the Sun is almost 12,000 times the diameter of the Earth. If the smaller planets are to be easily visible to