of meeting space and complimentary high-speed internet access throughout the common areas.Hilton University of Florida Conference Center Gainesville, a convenient choice among hotels in Gainesville, Florida, is situated directly on University of Florida campus with easy access to Gainesville attractions, including Butterfly Rainforest and Florida Museum of Natural History. Business is easy at our Gainesville hotel with over 25,000 sq. Every dollar you give helps fund our ongoing mission to provide Athens with quality, independent journalism.Combine Hilton hospitality with the convenience of an IACC Conference Center on campus at Hilton University of Florida Conference Center Gainesville. ![]() Like what you just read? Support Flagpole by making a donation today. And if you’re up for another attraction, the Northeast Georgia History Center a half-mile away offers exhibits on Native Americans and World War I, as well as a folk art gallery. If you want to return to the decade when space first entered public consciousness, go to the Collegiate Grill, half a block from the square at 220 Main St., for burgers, hot dogs, fries and milkshakes in an authentic early-’60s malt-shop environment. You and your crew might build up an appetite taking in the cosmic voyage of the Millennium Project, and downtown Gainesville has plenty of restaurants within walking distance of the square. About 200,000 visitors come walk along the planets each year, according to Regina Dyer, the Convention and Visitors Bureau manager for the city of Gainesville.Īlong the same trails, the city has also installed a “Storybook Trail,” in which youngsters can read pages of a book on granite stands posted at different sites. The trails you walk along the way are leafy and peaceful, and the planets are not always immediately visible from the trails, creating a kind of adventurous treasure hunt. Once you have a moment like that, it changes you.” If humans don’t make it here on Earth, we’re not going to make it. ![]() “Everyone knows, more or less, the facts about the solar system, but the scale model puts you in a position to have an epiphany about where Earth fits into the system. “If people walk the trail and give themselves time to think about it, the model really gives a sense of how small and isolated Earth is,” said Richard Webb, a retired astronomy educator and one of the trail’s original designers. The model of Pluto includes an arrow pointing toward Alpha Centauri, which would be located another 12,500 miles away. Representing the largest body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is a tiny bead of only 0.018 inches depicting Ceres, which had a brief moment as a planet in the early 19th Century. The designers also spaced the planets along the trails to scale, in order to give visitors a sense of the terrific distances between the planets, along with their relative sizes. Each planet’s model is a globe built exactly to scale and is posted on a granite stand with a brief description. Walk along the square to visit Mercury, Venus and Earth, and then into the parks, tracking each planet as you go with the visitors center’s map. Visitors should start at the beginning, with the big sun at the center of the solar system. A map showing the positions of each of the planet markers is available at the Gainesville Visitors Center, located at 117 Jesse Jewell Parkway. Two days later, Mercury, Venus and Mars were installed at the appropriate distances from the sun, represented by a 27-and-a-half-inch stainless-steel globe installed about a year later, at the corner of Spring and Bradford streets. The installation of the first station of the tour, a tiny quarter-inch piece of blue lapis lazuli stone representing Earth, launched the North Georgia Astronomers’ Millennium Project on Dec. (While Pluto is not considered a planet anymore, it was at the time the attraction was conceived.) Soon, the group worked out a plan for the model, including sponsors, funding and a location that placed the sun at Gainesville Square and extended the planets along the city’s parks for 1.8 miles to arrive at Pluto near Lake Lanier. In the shadows of that solar event, they came up with an idea: create a scale model of the solar system and arrange representations of the planets along a trail to provide a sense of the system’s enormity, as well as the different sizes of the planets. In fact, more than 64 million moons could be placed inside the sun if it were hollow.īut the astronomers soon realized that it was extremely difficult to comprehend this colossal difference in size. ![]() ![]() Twenty years ago, during a partial solar eclipse, members of the group North Georgia Astronomers were discussing the way the moon appeared to be close in size to the sun, but they knew that the sun was far larger than the moon.
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