(September 25, 2013 at 7:09 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote:(September 25, 2013 at 4:51 pm)pocaracas Wrote: And you want to know something awesome?!
If the angle between the sun and moon is ~180º, you get a full moon!
If you get exactly 180º, you get a lunar eclipse!
If it's ~0º, you get a new moon.
If it's exactly 0º, you get a solar eclipse!
And that's why people study astronomy...
Well... Eclipses require things to be lined up along the plane of the earth's orbit, you can have a 0/180 degree alignment along the lunar orbital plan and not have things line up correctly. That's why, even though 0/180 alignments occur every lunar orbit, eclipses are less frequent.
Interesting eclipse factoid: Solar eclipses are more common than lunar eclipses. However, as the shadow path is much smaller in area for solar eclipses, a particular location will have a viewable lunar eclipse much, much more frequently (i.e. solar eclipses are viewable only from a typically narrow path on earth, whereas lunar eclipses can be viewed from any location where the moon is visible).
hehe, hence my distinction between ~180 and exactly 180.
~180 is when the two planes don't align... exactly 180 is when they align and you get an exact 180º, using the Earth as the center.
