The solar system has come down to earth among the potato fields of northern Maine

So now this town of fewer than 10,000 souls, tucked into the far reaches of way northern Maine, really is located on the far side of the moon.

To be precise, it stands 1 mile north of planet Earth. This, of course, assumes you are calculating via the Maine Solar System Model, which places Earth and its moon next to Percy’s Auto Sales down along Route 1.

The Maine Solar System Model?

Absolutely. A community endeavor four years in the making before its completion in June, the MSSM is a three-dimensional roadside scale model of the solar system, stretching from the Northern Maine Museum of Science in Presque Isle 40 miles southward to the hamlet of Houlton. The scale is 93 million to 1; the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun, so here the model of the Earth is 1 mile from the sun. A wooden arch and wall painting at the museum, almost 50 feet in diameter, represents the sun, while Pluto, which takes some finding at the Houlton Information Center, is a 1-inch sphere. The other eight planets in this no-budget, grass-roots creation sit atop poles strung out along sparsely populated Route 1. Mercury is an accurately painted billiard ball at Burrelle’s Information Services. Saturn is a sphere with 10-foot-wide rings custom-made of steel, foam, and fiberglass that rises majestically across the highway from Carol Reeves’s house. And so it goes through five communities, a line of heavenly bodies standing tall among the gently rolling potato fields. Boston Globe

Here’s an interactive model diagramming the superimposition of the solar system on the map of that part of Maine.

And here’s a solar system model meta-page. (“Making scale models of the solar system is a useful way to learn about it. Here are various related pages.”)