Good drawing of Earth's orbit for model? Possibly vector file?

[FactChecker]

IMO, a lot of this thread is about scales and ignoring an important point. The correlation between temperature and distance, shown in @renormalize 's post #21 is the opposite of a logical, direct, cause-effect correlation. The temperature is high when the distance is great. The reason for this is that the real cause-effect at that location is between the tilt of the Earth axis versus temperature. Then the relationship between the axis tilt and the distance makes the distance/temperature correlation wrong.
Before worrying about the scales, the effect of axis tilt should be removed. For a location on the Equator, that effect is zero. For a location off the Equator, a statistical analysis might be required. That might be a tricky statistical problem.
The problem of scales is still there, and important, but I would worry about that later.

 

[Filip Larsen]

IMO, a lot of this thread is about scales and ignoring an important point. The correlation between temperature and distance, shown in @renormalize 's post #21 is the opposite of a logical, direct, cause-effect correlation.

Indeed, but I guess you must have skipped reading the posts that addressed that if you think it was ignored.

 

[FactChecker]

Indeed, but I guess you must have skipped reading the posts that addressed that if you think it was ignored.

Yes, but half of those posts are mine and they seem to get a fraction of the attention that they deserve. I will hold off from further comments on that subject.

 

[Filip Larsen]

Yes, but half of those posts are mine and they seem to get a fraction of the attention that they deserve.

Ah, OK, so you meant ignored by the OP (or dismissed as not important), and not as such ignored by the thread contributors as a whole. My mistake.

 

[sophiecentaur]

Ah, OK, so you meant ignored by the OP (or dismissed as not important), and not as such ignored by the thread contributors as a whole. My mistake.

This thread gets us nowhere. We all (with the exception of the OP) seem to agree about the 'facts' but the OP seems to want to use a 3D printer for something which is not really appropriate. There are many possible models of physical processes that are suitable for 3d printing. Astronomical models can never be 'authentic' / accurate enough to show true representations of the variables involved.

I really think the OP should consider his (or her) priorities before pressing on with the project.

 

[LightningInAJar]

For Earth this scale is around 1/23500 (with Sun roughly over 100 times bigger diameter than Earth), so making a useful desktop model with orbit and planetary sizes to same scale is almost impossible. With two different scales, one for orbits so the model fits on the desktop and one for planets so they become visible, the issue then is to make the planet (e.g. Earth) of visible size without the Sun (at same scale) "filling up" the orbit. Even at moderate Sun sizes, Earth would still be a small speck of dust, and if enlarged too much the Sun/orbit relative size becomes rather misleading.

I wasn't going to model the earth. Just have the edge of the orbit. 3D printing it should be cheap. Not a major project. Just curious what it might look like. I will take a photo when it's either printed or just the 3D file to make clear what I'm thinking when I have time to plug in the data.

 

[sophiecentaur]

I wasn't going to model the earth. Just have the edge of the orbit.

So why not use tilted discs to show the summer and winter orientation (not distance)? Easy to do and the tilt would be easily visible with a perpendicular / vertical rod to show temperature. You'd be showing something that's relevant and can be appreciated by the observer.

 

[LightningInAJar]

Basically this. A circular bar graph showing weekly variations in the weather. The central column represents maximum values. The Max. Temp in Buffalo, NY where I used the data for it I set to 99F as that was our all time hottest day ever in our history. And rain and snow fall maxes I used highest 7 day averages.

 

[sophiecentaur]

Basically this.

Smashing idea. It has plenty of info and really needs no extra info about the Earth's orbit. Alternative graphs are eye catching and can carry a powerful message. I don't know where this one (below) came from but it has impact in a similar way to yours. I'm not a footie fan - it's just the graph that impressed me.