There is a cricket orbiting the moon, which is orbiting the Earth, which is a short walk down Amish Pike from the sun in Enos Stutzman's roadside solar system.
The sun, both the real one and Stutzman's model, rises across the road from Plainview Christian School where he is principal and the kind of science teacher students tend to remember.Weather and vandalism did him in in the fall. Will redo in the fall.
Stutzman, searching for a way to demonstrate scale and distance when teaching about the universe, went to his wife's button box and a local metal shop to bring his ideas home.
He laid out his own scaled-down solar system over 7.4 miles of county roads. One inch equals 7,920 miles - the diameter of the Earth.
"That number is easy to remember, and it gives them a perspective on all of the distances," Stutzman said. "I've made scale models before in classrooms, and I've also made charts to show the distances. I tried to figure out a way to do both for a couple of years.
"I don't know where the inspiration came from. It just popped in my mind one day that this would be a way to do it."
He fashioned the sun by bending a 28-foot, 7-inch metal rod into a circle.
By contrast, Mercury is a shirt button; the moon a snap fastener; the Earth a slice of dowel the circumference of a broom handle. Jupiter, the largest planet, is a wooden sphere the size of a softball.
Each planet is nailed, with its name, to its own wooden post. It brings to mind the way Burma Shave might have done its advertising, asteroid to asteroid, had Martians been subject to 5 o'clock shadow:
Have spaceship
Will travel
Make Earth folks
Unravel
Burma Shave