Our Solar System from NASA

Hi everyone, I'm Marla from Fun Science Demos. Today we're going to be taking a look at a really cool website from NASA. And this website is going to allow us to look at the solar system in a really unique way. The easiest way to get on the website is to type right up here NASA eyes on the solar system. You'll notice that the first link that pops up has the NASA logo right here. You'll want to click on that. When you get onto the website you're going to see there is a lot going on. When you're looking at all these circles these are actually orbits. We've got Jupiter right there, we've got the Sun, we've got Mercury, Venus, and so much more. It's important to note that this is actually a live view of things that are orbiting in our solar system right now. And what things? Things like asteroids, comets, dwarf planets, and constellations, and so much more. I don't know about you but this is a lot to look at. Let's actually clean this up so we can see things a little easier. We're going to remove all of these checked boxes except for planets. Let's see what our solar system looks like on today December 13th. What's really cool about this website is we can actually zoom in and right now what you're seeing we can see the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. But we can't see the rest of our planets so let's actually zoom out. Notice we've got Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus. We can see all of our planets. Not only can we zoom in and out to see how far our planets are from one another, but we can actually change how we look at what's in our solar system. I mean what would it look like if we looked at it sideways? How cool is this? We can actually see that all of our planets are orbiting on the same leveled plane. This leveled plane that you're looking at right now is what scientists call the ecliptic. There are a lot of other objects in our solar system that we can actually take a closer look at. Objects like asteroids, dwarf planets, constellations. But today we're going to take a closer look at comets and their trails. Now we know that planets orbit around our Sun, but did you know that other objects do that as well? Other objects like comets. Let's take a look at one of the most well-known comets, Halley's Comet. Now here's Halley's Comet. It takes our Earth one year to orbit around the Sun, but it takes Halley's Comet 76 years to orbit around the Sun. 76 years? That's crazy! So if you were five when you saw Halley's Comet, that means the next time you'll see Halley's Comet is when you're 81. With this website we can actually click on Halley's Comet and find out more information. Take a look at what Halley's Comet actually looks like. It comes up with a description. We can move it around. We can read a lot more about the size, shape, and other features. With this website we can really have our eyes on the solar system. I invite you to explore more. You can check out the link down below in the description. In our next video we're going to take a closer look at an app called Skyview. If you want to take a closer look early, you can check out the link in the description down below. If you want to learn more about Earth and space science, feel free to check out our YouTube channel Fun Science Demos. Thanks for watching!