Printable Planet and Solar System Coloring Pages

Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system, measuring only about 3,032 miles across, barely larger than Earth's own moon. It also orbits closer to the sun than any other planet, sitting an average of about 36 million miles away, close enough that a year on Mercury, one full orbit, takes just 88 Earth days.

Despite its speedy orbit, Mercury spins very slowly on its axis, completing one full rotation in about 59 Earth days, which means the sun rises and sets much more slowly on Mercury than the length of its own year would suggest.

The round craters covering Mercury in this scene reflect a real surface shaped by billions of years of asteroid and comet impacts, largely unchanged because Mercury has almost no atmosphere to erode them away.

Venus is often called Earth's twin because it is nearly the same size, measuring about 7,521 miles across compared to Earth's 7,918 miles, and it is built from similar rocky material. Despite those similarities, Venus is one of the least hospitable places in the solar system, with a surface hot enough to melt lead and an atmosphere nearly 100 times heavier than Earth's own air pressure.

Venus is the second planet from the sun and the closest planetary neighbor to Earth, coming within about 25 million miles at its nearest approach, closer than any other planet ever gets to us.

No complete photograph of the whole Earth existed until December 7, 1972, when the crew of Apollo 17 pointed a Hasselblad camera back at the planet roughly 18,000 miles into their journey to the Moon. The resulting image, nicknamed the Blue Marble, remains one of the most reproduced photographs in history. Before that flight, every prior spacecraft had been too close or at the wrong angle to capture the entire sunlit disk in one frame, so people had only ever seen partial views or artist renderings of their home planet from a distance.

Globes have modeled Earth as a sphere since at least 150 BCE, when the Greek scholar Crates of Mallus is credited with building one of the earliest known examples, though none of his originals survive.

Print this Earth globe page for a science-class Earth Day activity, a geography warm-up, or a quiet at-home coloring session about our home planet.

Mars earned its nickname the Red Planet because iron minerals in its surface dust have oxidized over billions of years, essentially rusting the way an old iron nail rusts on Earth, coating the ground in a fine reddish-orange powder. That same iron-rich dust occasionally whips up into massive planet-wide dust storms that can last for weeks and completely hide the surface from orbiting spacecraft.

The winding canyon system Valles Marineris stretches roughly 2,500 miles across the Martian surface, more than ten times longer than Earth's Grand Canyon and deep enough in places to swallow Mount Everest with room to spare.

The Great Red Spot has been tracked by astronomers since at least 1830, and some records suggest possible sightings as far back as the 1600s, making it one of the longest-lived storms known anywhere in the solar system. The storm is wide enough to swallow Earth whole, though measurements over the past century show it has been gradually shrinking - from an estimated 25,000 miles across in the late 1800s to roughly 10,000 miles wide today.

In January 1610, Galileo Galilei pointed a homemade telescope at Jupiter and noticed four small points of light that moved position from night to night.

Print this Jupiter page for a solar-system classroom unit, a planet-report cover sheet, or a rainy-afternoon coloring activity.

Saturn is the second-largest planet in the solar system, yet it is made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium gas with no solid surface to stand on. Its density is so low that Saturn would actually float if a bathtub large enough existed to hold it, since it is the only planet in the solar system less dense than water. That light, gassy body is part of why Saturn's fast spin - one full day lasts only about 10.7 hours - flattens the planet slightly at its poles into a visibly squashed sphere.

Saturn takes about 29.5 Earth years to complete a single orbit around the sun, meaning a child born the year Saturn was overhead in a certain part of the sky would be almost thirty before it returned to that same spot.

Uranus is famous for spinning almost completely on its side, tilted about 98 degrees compared to Earth's gentle 23-degree tilt, so it essentially rolls around the sun like a ball instead of spinning upright like most other planets. Scientists believe a massive collision with another large object, possibly early in the solar system's history, knocked Uranus onto its side and it has stayed that way ever since.

That extreme tilt means Uranus experiences some of the strangest seasons in the solar system, with each pole pointing almost directly at the sun for about 21 years straight before swinging into darkness for another 21 years, since one full orbit around the sun takes Uranus roughly 84 Earth years to complete.

Neptune orbits farther from the sun than any other planet, sitting an average of about 2.8 billion miles away, so distant that sunlight takes over four hours to reach it compared to about eight minutes for Earth. That huge distance also means Neptune takes roughly 165 Earth years to complete a single orbit, so it has not yet finished one full year since its discovery in 1846.

Neptune's deep blue color comes from methane gas in its upper atmosphere, which absorbs red light from the sun and reflects blue light back toward space, giving the planet its striking ocean-like appearance in photographs.

Pluto orbits far beyond Neptune in a distant region called the Kuiper Belt, a wide ring of icy bodies left over from the solar system's early formation. It is small even by dwarf-planet standards, measuring about 1,477 miles across, which is smaller than Earth's own moon and roughly two-thirds the width of the United States.

Pluto was classified as the ninth planet from its discovery in 1930 until 2006, when astronomers defined a stricter set of rules for what counts as a full planet and reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet because it has not cleared other objects out of its orbital path.

The sun is not a planet at all but a star, an enormous ball of hydrogen and helium gas so large that more than one million Earths could fit inside it. Its gravity is strong enough to hold every planet, moon, comet, and asteroid in the solar system in orbit around it, even objects more than three billion miles away in the outer darkness beyond Neptune.

Sunlight takes about eight minutes to travel from the sun's surface to Earth, which means every sunbeam warming a backyard actually left the sun eight minutes earlier. The sun has been burning for about 4.6 billion years and has enough fuel left to keep shining for roughly another five billion years before it changes into a different kind of star entirely.