Solar system moels, 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.