OK, here is an astronomy lesson. The orbit of the moon is not a circle, it is an ellipse, which is egg-shaped. What that means is that sometimes the moon is closer to us, and sometimes it is further away. Back in March the full moon was as close to us as it has been in years. So I used my telescope and Nikon to photograph it. I made a note on my calendar, after checking the data, to find out when the full moon would be the furthest from us. That day was today. I set up the telescope last night, a day early, because of good weather, and photographed the moon again. I had no idea how much larger or smaller the two would be. I was really surprised that the difference in size was this great. What a wonderful and illuminating surprise.
4 comments:
Good Lesson, but I thought the full moon is tomorrow the 12th.
Joan
Good catch! Because the weather for the full moon was looking dicey, and because I didn't want to miss this shot, I photographed a day or two early. The full moon is tonight, the 11th, at 10:07 PM
that is WAY too cool!!! thank you.
Sam asks the viewer to measure, by any method, the size of each moon's diameter and discover that the percentage difference between the two measurements IS the eccentricity of the moon's orbit!
Answers will be about 0.055, or 5.5%!
Get your mm rulers out, or measure any other way- pixels, inches if your monitor is very large, and so on!!
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