Plan your journey through the Solar System with Big Sky Bike Adventures
- jacquie Crawford
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
If you’ve ever wanted to explore the Solar System without needing a rocket, a spacesuit, or a NASA budget… good news. All you need is Big Sky Bike Adventures, some curiosity, and the Otago Central Rail Trail.
Welcome to the Otago Central Interplanetary Cycle Trail - where our entire Solar System has been shrunk down by a mind-boggling 100,000,000 to one and mapped onto the trail. It’s science, it’s scenery, and it’s a seriously fun free extra you'll only find on the Otago Central Rail Trail.
A Solar System… on the Central Otago Rail Trail?
Yep! Each planet (plus the Moon) has been recreated as a perfectly scaled model, matched to its true size and placed the correct scaled distance from the Sun.
And where’s the Sun? Right in Ranfurly, shining as the center of this cosmic adventure.
Mercury appears just over half a kilometre from Ranfurly,
Jupiter sits nearly 8 km along,
Neptune is a 45 km cruise away (almost the last outpost before you fall off the edge of the universe (aka depart Middlemarch for Dunedin).
All Big Sky riders receive a free Interplanetary Trail flyer - an easy-to-follow guide to each planet, the distances, and the fun astronomical quirks along the way. It’s the perfect pocket guide for your cosmic adventure.
Wrap your mind around the scale
Here’s where the fun really starts. Shrinking the Solar System down by 100 million times means some truly wild things happen:
1 cm on the model = 1000 km in real space
Each step you take = 75,000 km travelled through the Solar System
Each turn of your bike wheel = more than 200,000 km
So while you’re pedalling along through Central’s big skies and wide valleys, you’re also zipping past planets faster than any spacecraft ever launched.
A time warp on two wheels
If we also shrink time by the same scale, the speed of light - normally an impossible 300,000,000 m/s - becomes a very manageable 10.8 km/h. In other words, you could outrun light on your bike (It’s not every day you get to say that.)
And here’s where your brain might melt a little:
In this delightfully squished universe, one second equals over three years in real life.
Humans (Homo sapiens) would have existed for just 26 seconds.
Dinosaurs? They disappeared only eight months ago.
And your bike bell? At this scale, the sound would take almost a year to travel 100 metres. So please don’t rely on it at road crossings.
The magic of the trail
As you ride, each planet marker gives you a new sense of just how huge the Solar System really is and how tiny we are within it. Jupiter and Saturn loom impressively large as giant spheres. Earth and Venus are more humble. And Pluto… well, Pluto is about the size of a small apricot, positioned almost 60 km from the Sun.
The whole model is a blend of astronomy and Central Otago charm - a chance to contemplate the cosmos while rolling through our stunning big sky landscapes.
Don’t miss the equinox special
If you’re riding around the March or September equinox, there’s a bonus surprise.
Between 8am and 9am, the shadows of the Earth and Moon line up on the eclipse board - the trail’s very own mini lunar eclipse. Cosmic timing at its finest.
A local legacy
The Interplanetary Trail was dreamed up by Ian C. Begg, grandson of the co-founder of Dunedin’s Beverley-Begg Observatory. It was brought to life with help from Associate Professor Antoni Moore from the University of Otago’s School of Surveying - a wonderful blend of science, community, and creativity.
Keep Exploring
Once you’ve completed your interplanetary adventure (congratulations on travelling billions of kilometres while riding 152km!), you can dive deeper into the universe:
Visit the Beverley-Begg Observatory in Dunedin
Explore Tūhura Otago Museum’s Perpetual Guardian Planetarium
Enjoy a discount at the Museum Shop (Just show your Interplanetary Trail flyer.)
Because once you start exploring the universe… it’s very hard to stop.
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