DALLASI absolutely love this, it's called an orrery, and it's a little mechanical model of our solar system. You can see the planets here, orbiting the sun as they would do in real life.

An Egyptian astronomer called Ptolemy (AD100-168) described one of the earliest ideas for how the Solar System is structured. Ptolemy’s model and many earlier ideas of the Solar System had the ...

Credit: University of Western Ontario Gregg, a Ph.D. candidate in physics and astronomy, developed a computer model to study our solar system, Alpha Centauri and the interstellar activity—the ...