Peoria has one of the largest scale models of the solar system in the world, stretching across the city at a scale of 1:39 billion. The Sun is represented by a sphere outside the Peoria Riverfront Museum on the waterfront; the planets are distributed across the city at the correct proportional distances from each other. Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are within easy walking distance of the museum, but Pluto — if you still count it — is several miles away.
The model was created as an educational project and the planets are marked with explanatory plaques. It turns a walk through Peoria into a tour of the solar system, and the distances between the outer planets give a visceral sense of how empty space actually is. The project covers roughly twelve miles in total and makes for an unusual city-spanning walking or cycling route.