Inside the design of the new Planetary Society member T-shirt

Whenever The Planetary Society takes on a creative design project, we’re faced with a challenge: how to marry scientific accuracy with artistic style. The design on the newest Planetary Society member shirt was one such challenge. We wanted to show the worlds of the Solar System, but how?

As advocates for exploration of all planetary bodies, we wouldn’t want to make any omissions, but there sure are a lot of worlds out there. Scale complicates things further. Any graphic attempting true distances would place the outer planets somewhere off the hem of the shirt.

To solve this problem, we turned to longtime Planetary Society designer Thomas Romer, the artist behind the merch in our online store, the mission patches for both LightSail 1 and LightSail 2, and more. Romer’s visual style has become part of the organization’s identity, thanks to his ability to blend scientific accuracy with graphic clarity. This new piece follows in the footsteps of his previous member-exclusive T-shirt designs.

To depict the Solar System in this project, Romer took an artistic approach that creatively retains a sense of relative size where possible, but abandons physical distance entirely — the worlds depicted are jumbled together, rather than stretched out in a map of orbits. It’s like our planetary neighborhood is together at a planetary block party.

But, of course, the whole gang can’t be there at once. There are just too many planetary bodies to fit on one shirt. So Romer chose to include only the most noteworthy moons and two Kuiper Belt objects: Pluto and Eris.

The decision to include Eris was a particularly thoughtful one. Pluto might be the obvious choice to represent the vast collection of small, icy bodies beyond Neptune. It is the most famous member of that group of worlds, after all. However, Eris played a pivotal role in reshaping our astronomical classification system. Its discovery — and the fact that it is more massive than Pluto — prompted astronomers to create the definition of a dwarf planet, which included Eris as well as Pluto. Having had such a big impact on our understanding of our Solar System, we can’t omit Eris from a depiction of important worlds.

This new member T-shirt is more than just a cool addition to your wardrobe. It’s also a great example of the blend of science and artistry that goes into design. This Solar System shirt distills our cosmic neighborhood into a snapshot, celebrating the beauty of exploration and the joy of being part of a community that supports it.

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