Saturday, April 28, 2007

Moon orbits in a tilted plane

When I posted the photo of the earth and moon a couple days ago, it struck me that based on the position of the earth and moon and the implied position of the sun, it seems like the moon orbits in tilted plane to that of the earth and sun.

The thought kept bugging me, so I did a little web searching and found this link which has a really good picture of the model I'm thinking of.

If I'm understanding correctly from Wikipedia the moon's orbit wobbles, but the average tilt of the moons orbit vs. that of the earth-sun is around 5% - so it's close to "flat", but not quite. The picture above makes it look more extreme.

It's strange that I get to be 36 years old and for some reason I'd not considered the angle of the moon's orbit to be anything other than "flat" along the plane of the sun. Come to think of it - eclipses would be alot more common if the orbit was flat though, but as it is its rare that everything aligns.

1 comment:

Trish Milburn said...

Interesting. I hadn't really thought about it.