Solar System Coloring Pages

Space is the subject children ask the biggest questions about, and these solar system coloring pages try to hold a few answers: the planets themselves, the sun and the moon, and the people and machines that go out to see them.

The planets come first. A row of planets stands across the page from smallest to largest, a solar system mandala places them on their orbits around the sun, a ringed planet tilts among its small moons, a striped gas giant shows its cloud bands and a great oval storm, a stormy ringed planet swirls, and a rocky planet is split by a deep canyon with two potato-shaped moons. A cratered planet sits close to the fiery edge of the sun, and the sun gets a page of its own, with flames around its rim and looping arcs rising from its edge. The moon phases are laid out in a wheel. Further out, a comet streaks past the asteroids, another comet is drawn in icy facets, a small probe weaves through an asteroid field, two moons rise over a rocky ridge, and a spiral galaxy curls across the page.

The explorers fill the rest. An astronaut floats above the moon on a tether, plants a flag as a chibi, drives a rover, turns upside down in low gravity, shakes hands with a friendly alien, waters plants inside a glass dome, sleeps in a sleeping bag strapped to the wall and reaches for a floating drop of water. A rocket lifts off through clouds, another blasts past a ringed planet, a third is cut open to show the crew's deck and hammocks. A space station orbits above Earth, a shuttle docks with a wheel-shaped station, a lunar lander rests on a crater rim, and a satellite drifts over a striped planet. At home, a child sits in a cardboard rocket, two children stargaze in cardboard helmets, and a cat keeps a telescope company. A planet framed in a border of moons and suns, and a mandala of rockets and crescent moons, complete the set.

Eight planets and a sentence to remember them

The solar system has eight planets. In order from the sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The first four are small and rocky; the last four are giants made mostly of gas and ice. Pluto was counted as the ninth planet until 2006, when astronomers decided it belongs with a group of smaller bodies and called it a dwarf planet.

A sentence helps children keep the order: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos. The first letter of each word is the first letter of a planet.

The giant storm on the gas giant page is modeled on Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a storm wider than the whole Earth that has been blowing for at least two hundred years. And every ringed planet on these pages owes something to Saturn, whose rings are made of billions of pieces of ice, from grains of dust to chunks the size of a house.

How big and how far

The planets on a coloring page sit side by side, but real space is almost empty. If the sun were the size of a front door, Earth would be the size of a small coin about two hundred meters away, and Neptune would be a tennis ball more than six kilometers down the road. Light, the fastest thing there is, takes about eight minutes to travel from the sun to Earth and around four hours to reach Neptune. That is why the row of planets on these pages is a picture of their sizes, never of their distances.

What color is each planet

• Mercury: gray, cratered, much like the moon.
• Venus: pale yellow and cream, hidden under thick clouds.
• Earth: blue oceans, green and brown land, white clouds and ice caps.
• Mars: rusty red-orange, from iron in its dust.
• Jupiter: bands of cream, tan, orange and brown, with the red-orange spot.
• Saturn: pale gold with lighter rings.
• Uranus: pale cyan, almost turquoise.
• Neptune: deep blue.

For a black sky around the planets, dark blue or purple colored hard looks richer than black. Leave little white dots unpainted for stars.

Quick planets and full space scenes

The quickest pages have a single round shape, like the sun, the moon phase wheel and the chibi planet. Quick to color, above the grid, begins with:

• Spiral galaxy
• Moon phases
• The sun and its solar loops

The detailed ones are busy with panels, craters and people, the space station, the rover and the stargazing children. Lots of detail begins with:

• Stargazing in cardboard helmets
• Planet in a border
• Astronaut driving a rover

Make a paper solar system mobile

Print the row of planets and a few of the single planet pages. Color each planet in its real colors, cut them out and glue each one back to back onto thin card so both sides show. Punch a small hole at the top of each, tie on threads of different lengths, and hang them in order from a coat hanger or a stick, with a big colored sun from the sun page at one end. Hung from a bedroom ceiling, it turns slowly whenever a door opens, and children learn the order just by looking up.

Printing the solar system

Each page is a free A4 PDF drawn at 300 dpi. Print it at full size on A4, or with "fit to page" on US Letter, which scales it down about six percent so that no planet ring is cut. The printing guide shows the setting. Add to pack gathers the whole solar system into one file. Our own planet has its own collection in the Earth coloring pages, the night sky continues in the star coloring pages, flight closer to home is in the airplane coloring pages, and the mandalas pair well with the mandala coloring pages.