Moon I – Phases & Eclipses

The guardian of our night skies never fails to mesmerize us with the wonders its capable of through its perfectly timed and relatively simple motions. Lets start with the phases of the moon – did you know that inspite of the moon orbiting around the earth and rotating on its axis we always see the same side of the moon, its due to this phenomenon called tidal locking which we will probably dive into later in part II.

Phases

Ancient humans used the phases of moon to keep track of days and seasons – that’s actually where our division of months also comes from as a lunar cycle is ~29.5 days

Why this happens?

Moon shines because of the sun light it reflects, as moon orbits around the earth, the position of the moon changes both with respect to Earth and the sun – this leads to part of the luminated side of the moon to be visible to us – these are called the phases of the moon

Figure 1 – Phases of moon

In Figure 1 above, we see how moon goes from a full moon when its directly between sun and earth to a full moon being on the other side with the illuminated part being visible to us increasing day by day (waxing) to a full moon and then decreasing (waning) and back to a new moon.

Orbit

Interestingly enough the orbit of moon is not perfectly circular either, its elliptical leadinf to a perigee (closest point to the earth – where moon appears bigger – supermoon) and an apogee where moon appears smaller.

The moon takes 27 days to orbit the earth (note lunar cycle is 29.5 days) – the difference here is because of earth’s movement around the sun

There is also a precessional motion noticed in the moon every ~8.85 years where the axis change directions (orbit rotates)

Moon’s orbit is also tilted with respect to earth and this tilt varies from 5-5.3 degrees (averaged around 5.1 degrees) – because of the gravitational effect of sun. This precesses over 18.6 year cycle

And moon is also not perpendicular to its orbit, its tilted by about 6.68 degrees towards its orbital plane around earth

In addition to that every year moon moves 3.8cm away from us. We’ll do a separate article diving into details of orbital mechanics of the moon as it is quite interesting on its own.

Solar Eclipse

Solar eclipse occurs when moon lies on thw same line between earth and sun, blocking out the light of sun (partially or fully) from earth.

The different types of solar eclipses are categorized as total (moon covers the sun completely), partial (moon covers only part of the sun), annular (apparent size of the moon is smaller – and leaves a ring)

Its important to note that eclipses are based on 3 bodies – a light emitting, a light blocking and an observing body.

These eclipse models are geocentric since we make our observations from earth.

Figure 2 – Line of nodes

Figure 2 above shows some different possible positions of earth, moon and sun system – even though there’re different possibilities of a new moon and full mon, an eclipse only occurs when moon is said to be along the line of nodes (moon is between the earth and the sun), solar eclipse occurs when moon is said to be a new moon – illuminated side facing away from us

Figure 3 – Moon’s orbit

Lunar Eclipse

Continuing from what was said above a lunar eclipse will occur when moon is a full moon and along the line of nodes (earth is directly between the sun and moon)

Figure 4 – Umbra and Penumbra

Figure 4 above shows both solar and lunar eclipse. For lunar eclipse, the eclipse is categorized in different types:

  • total lunar eclipse occurs when the moon is completely in earth’s shadow (umbra – dark central part) – this is when the moon often appears to have a reddish tint – because some sunlight from the edges of earth reaches to illuminate the moon – this light passes through the earth’s atmosphere which scatters most of the blue light (scattering follows an inverse relation with wavelength – longer wavelengths like red scattering less) leaving mostly red light to reach the moon.
  • partial lunar eclipse is said to occur when moon is partially in the umbral region
  • penumbral lunar eclipse occurs when moon pases through the penumbral (outer lighter region) of earth’s shadow

Calculating Eclipse

https://github.com/w-winnie/livnlearn/blob/main/eclipses_livnlearnversion.ipynb

eclipses_livnlearnversion

References

https://science.nasa.gov/moon/moon-phases

https://science.nasa.gov/moon/tidal-locking

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5326

https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/LEdecade/LEdecade2021.html

https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEgoogle/SEgoogle2021.html

https://www.space.com/55-earths-moon-formation-composition-and-orbit.html#section-moon-faqs-answered-by-an-expert

Share:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *