elliptical orbit
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What is a Solar Eclipse?
March 2024: This post has been updated and republished from Sept 2017. A solar eclipse is the most amazing astronomical sight you’ll ever see. Not only is it the only time you’ll ever be able to clearly see the “new…
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What is Gravity, Anyway?
Q: What is gravity? (asked by Simon) Wow…great question. This is a question the greatest scientific minds have asked and tried to answer for centuries. It’s a question not even Stephen Hawking, the scientific genius of the century, has fully…
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Einstein: Space-Time Curvature
When you hear about “space-time,” it’s just a way to say that space is related to time. And the curvature of space-time, as Albert Einstein predicted, is the way space and time alike literally bend around a mass such as the…
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How Orbits Work
Since Aristotle’s time over 2000 years ago, we have accepted that the moon orbits the Earth. We didn’t always know why, and we didn’t always accept this for the right reasons. We used to assume that it happened just because…
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Johannes Kepler and Planetary Motion
Thales and Pythagoras suggested that the natural world could be understood. Aristotle dared to imagine what was beyond the Earth. Plato encouraged thought about the universe, even if he did take astronomy one step forward and two steps backward. Copernicus…
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Lunar Phases and Motion
The lunar phases…who really understands ’em? We see them all the time. When we look up at the moon in the sky, we’re bound to notice that it looks just a little bit different from the last time we saw…
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Orbit and Climate
You have probably all heard of ice ages. And no, I don’t mean the Ice Age movies… Although, Ice Age is actually a pretty good example of what happens during a real-life ice age. I haven’t seen enough of the movies to…
