This 23-foot scale model of the moon is making its way around the world, allowing viewers to get close and see the many facets of this amazing celestial object. Each centimeter on the replica represents 5 kilometers on the lunar surface.

Created by artist Luke Jerram, the Museum of the Moon is stopping in China, Finland, Australia and other countries to stop in exhibit spaces and outdoor venues.

The model was based on a 70-foot-wide image taken by NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera satellites and compiled by NASA’s Astrogeology Science Center.

While the moon is remarkable to see in the sky, without technical assistance (like a telescope) it is hard to make out the details — this model aims to change that.

“As it travels from place to place, it will gather new musical compositions and an ongoing collection of personal responses, stories and mythologies, as well as highlighting the latest moon science.” (Images by Carl Milner, Gareth Jones, Leeds Living, Neil James, via Colossal)

A sports car parked in a residential alley, train emerging from a tunnel and helicopter landing next to the Colosseum are all believable sights in Italy’s capital … except in this case they are constructed from LEGO.

Italian photographer Domenico Franco imagines these block-built vehicles at human scale in his series LEGO Outside LEGOLAND, masterfully faked scenes of photo-realistic quality.

In his series, normal conveyances are swapped with LEGO creations that stand out as simplified block forms against the rich historical fabric of Rome.

While some are clearly toys writ large, others are more convincing: a passing glance at a tractor trailer doing road work might not immediately belie its fictional origins.

Landmark buildings and aged cobblestone roads come alive thanks to the contrast created by intervening toys. Ordinary gray-blue weather and aged architecture seems even more real than in a normal photograph.

“The aim is to transform ordinary contexts in extraordinary ones,” says the artist, “thus compelling the toys to get out of the idyllic and politically correct landscapes belonging to their perfect and idealistic cities, with the result of instilling in them those vices, virtues and desires typical of human beings.”

Many contemporary architects cut and paste scale figures into their renderings to show depth and dimension, but in cases where they draw their own, aspects of their style and personality become apparent in the radical differences between their approaches.

Frank Gehry’s figure, perhaps predictably, is a mess of forms and shapes. Walter Gropius’ betrays a Bauhaus bent, all angles and boxes. Steven Holl, of course, is a lovely little watercolor, expressive and reflective of his well-known habit for creating daily water-colored sketches.

New York architectural designer Noor Makkiya has collected twenty-one such examples for a series dubbed simply Figures, isolating them on neutral backgrounds to allow for easy side-by-side comparisons.

The variations are dramatic, between highly-stylized forms to simplified human figures or completely abstract sets of shapes forming nearly-illegible avatars, all showing something about the architect behind them and how they choose to represent their work.

From the collector: “Human figures are typically used in an architecture rendering to provide a clear scale for the common eye. Thanks to new technologies like Photoshop we have lost our “ontological dimension”, and the copy paste method we use makes it easier for us to fill architecture renderings with a desultory crowd of figures.”

“True architects since the early centuries used human figures not only to describe the quantity and the quality of the environment but also for deeper purposes of study and expression. Some used it as means of architecture inspiration, demonstrating the divine power of the human order. Other architects use human figures to emphasize on the activity within the space, sometimes it is important to depict the spatial properties of a design. Architects project themselves into the human figure. So if we compare drawings from different architects, we frequently find differences in body shape and body activity, for practicing architects often represent their own ideologies as a reference for understanding the human physical condition.”

Starting with a model planet Earth the size of a marble, a team of filmmakers set out to simulate our entire solar system in motion and capture the results in a compelling short movie.

In normal images and models of the planets in our solar neighborhood, nothing is too scale – at scale on a piece of paper, planets becoming vanishingly small and effectively impossible to see on the page. Textbooks and other graphics misrepresent sizes almost by necessity simply because it would be impossible to depict things otherwise in a small visual field.

The resulting visuals distort our sense of the distance between celestial bodies. In the scale model featured above, set in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet give the viewer a much greater intuitive understanding of the separation and size of these spatial objects.

“As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart.” said James Irwin, Apollo 15 astronaut. He is one of only 24 people in human history have seen the full circle of the Earth with their own eyes.

Using LED lights, GPS calculations, a dirt disrupter and ultimately cars driving in circles to simulate the orbits at night, the team created a 1:847,638,000 scale model in which blips of light represent the various bodies in space.

One of the participants climbed a nearby mountain to film it all from above, while post-production overlays create a key for the video. Process documentation was made in part with a drone flying overhead. According to its creators, this is the first scale model of the solar system ever constructed.

We are accustomed to being able to click a few buttons and get 2D prints of cities, blocks or buildings, and now a new web app allows you to create your own 3D model just as easily, picking and printing your favorite parts of Manhattan.

Inspired by Terrafab, a similar app that lets you print out custom selected, scoped and scaled sections of Norway’s gorgeous natural topographies, ibldi uses a similar approach but turns it toward America’s largest cityscape.

For now, Terrafab offers more functionality and versatility, spanning an entire country, letting users customize their viewport and allowing selections ranging from tiny to gigantic. It is not hard to imagine, though, similar open map APIs in the near future allowing any section of the planet to be likewise selected and printed.

From Terrafab: “Arguably, Norway has one of the top five most incredible terrains in the known universe. Now you can create your own 3D-printed genuine gypsum heirloom mantelpiece display replica of your favorite part of this formidable landscape in two easy steps.”