Oranges and basketballs, blueberries and carriage wheels, motor cars and oil lamps, sewn samplers and even rotisserie chickens: a constellation of familiar objects has been put to work in attempts to teach the solar system over the past three hundred years. The heavens were brought down to earth as authors and educators deployed physical analogues and recruited sensory experiences to teach what was seen as a fundamental starting-point for astronomical knowledge. In this paper I shall use the solar system as a means of interrogating ‘familiar science’ from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. As a standard part of all introductory texts and lectures, exploring the ways in which the solar system was incarnated provides an excellent example of how the shifting contours of the familiar world were mapped onto novel scientific knowledge, in this case of the universe. Analysing how and why new objects were brought into introductory explanations, and what those objects were, elucidates how these lessons participated in debates over the place of and participants in the sciences. Moreover, it confirms that familiar analogies were only effective when they were, in fact, familiar to their audiences; an assumption put to the test, of course, by the early twentieth century, when the solar system itself became a model for the atom.