We demonstrate it

This video shows how our Royal Observatory Greenwich Astronomer Brendan Owens used the same equipment we gave you to make the Solar System in a box. This is such a simple idea but very effective, some of you may even have had the same idea. This demonstration works well because it isn’t too abstract and helps to teach the concept of scale in our solar system which is very tricky indeed.

When it comes to demonstrations they can be your best friend or your worst enemy so our advice is use them carefully.

Demos are fantastic to help explain abstract concepts if the model or analogy you use is incredibly similar to the concept you are trying to describe. If it is too much of a jump a demo will fail because the task becomes more about trying to work out what the actual demo means rather than the astronomy concept it was initially designed to help explain.