If you’ve been noticing the Moon (based on last week’s blog post), let’s try to build a model based on your observations. I’ll get you started with relative sizes and then we figure out where things belong based on our observations. You’ll need:
Moon’s Orbit: a circle of about 25”
Earth: a marble (about ½”)
Moon: a square of sticky post-it note with a dot drawn on it (about 1/8”)
This video was shot a few days after a New Moon… Knowing that the Full Moon was yesterday… can you think where the moon would be on your model? If you observed both the Moon and the sun yesterday you should have noticed that your pointing arms were making an 180˚ angle (or a straight line). This means you’d have to put the Moon exactly opposite from the sun.
Here’s one more video to help you get a sense of how the Moon is orbiting and how we’re seeing it from Earth.
Next week we'll do some hands-on investigations that will help us with our eclipse observing.