Westfield Students Unveil One-Mile Solar System Walk with Guided Tour

On Nov. 29, members of the Westfield High School Astronomy Club — Krystyna Goulette and club president Kaitlyn Goulette — led a ribbon-cutting and narrated opening for a one-mile Solar System Walk along the Columbia Greenway Rail Trail (CGRT).

Krystyna opened the ceremony by thanking the project’s supporters: Westfield Bank, which sponsored the permanent planetary signs; the Department of Public Works, with special recognition for Fran Cain for installing the displays; and the Friends of the Columbia Greenway, with thanks to Kathleen Hillman for her leadership.

The walk compresses the vast distances of the solar system into a one-mile trail: on this scale, one foot equals about 530,000 miles. The trail begins at the CGRT entrance near Stop & Shop and proceeds south, with permanent signs at each stop offering facts and images.

Guided Tour: Sun to Neptune

Following the ribbon-cutting, Kaitlyn led roughly 30 attendees on a narrated tour that started at the model of the Sun and moved outward through the planets.

Mercury: Placed at the first stop, Mercury lies close to the Sun and is small — only slightly larger than Earth’s Moon — which makes it hard to spot with the naked eye. It rotates slowly (one Mercury day equals many Earth days) and completes an orbit in a relatively short time compared with outer planets.

Venus: The second planet is named for the Roman goddess of love and beauty. Venus is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon and is extremely hot, with surface temperatures high enough to melt lead. A Venusian day is much longer than its year due to its slow rotation.

Earth: Kaitlyn lightened the tour with a relatable note: Earth is her favorite because it’s the only known planet where you can find Oreo cookies.

Mars: The Red Planet’s distinctive color comes from iron-rich soil. About half the diameter of Earth, Mars has a similar day length and a much longer year. Through a backyard telescope, viewers can glimpse polar ice caps, varied terrain, and features such as large volcanoes and canyons. Several missions and landers have explored Mars’s surface.

Jupiter: After crossing the scaled asteroid belt, the group reached Jupiter. As the largest planet, Jupiter is many times wider than Earth and rotates rapidly, which makes its atmosphere and banded features readily observable. The planet hosts dozens of moons, and astronomers are still finding new, small satellites.

Saturn: Famous for its ring system of ice, rock and dust, Saturn is an excellent target for observation. It has hundreds of moons and many recent discoveries among its smaller satellites. While Saturn itself is inhospitable, some of its moons remain intriguing in the search for possible habitability.

Uranus: The tour next reached the ice giant Uranus, notable for its unusual axial tilt that makes its rings appear nearly vertical from our vantage point. One theory holds that a collision early in the solar system’s history knocked Uranus on its side. Voyager II’s 1986 flyby remains the only close spacecraft visit to Uranus.

Neptune: The final stop, Neptune, sits roughly a mile from the trail’s start on the scale model. Historically, Neptune’s existence was predicted through mathematical analysis of Uranus’s orbit before it was observed directly. It is a distant, cold giant with multiple moons, and Voyager II conducted the only close flyby in 1989.

Recording and Future Plans

The ribbon-cutting and walkthrough were recorded by Brady LePage of Westfield Community TV and are available to watch on the Community Programming channel. The WHS Astronomy Club hopes to schedule a public telescope night near the walk’s far end — an open spot by an old tobacco field that offers a dark, unobstructed sky ideal for stargazing.