php require("/home/jeffery/public_html/astro/moon/moon_clementine.html");?>
Caption:
"The ecliptic plane
is illustrated in this
Clementine probe star tracker camera
image which reveals the
Moon lit by
Earthshine,
the
Sun's
corona
rising over the Moon's
dark limb,
and the planets
going leftward:
- Saturn.
- Mars.
- Mercury.
The ecliptic plane
is the plane of the
Earth's orbit around
the Sun. In the course of a
sidereal year (365.256363004 days, J2000),
the Sun's apparent path through the sky lies in
the ecliptic plane.
The planetary bodies of our Solar System
all tend to lie
near the ecliptic plane,
since they were formed from the Sun's spinning,
flattened protoplanetary disk.
The snapshot nicely
captures a momentary line-up in the
ecliptic plane."
(Slightly edited.)
Features:
- The shown
planets don't exactly line up because
their orbits
have orbital inclinations
from the ecliptic plane:
for Mercury 7.005°,
for Mars 1.85°,
and
for Saturn 2.49°.
- Since the outer planets Saturn and
Mars are closer to the
Sun than
the inner Mercury in projection
on the sky, they must be on the
far side of their orbits
relative to the Earth.
- It's hard to say where Mercury
is on
its orbit,
except that it's NOT aligned with the Sun
from the point of view of
Clementine.
- The image actually looks at bit fake, but it's real.
The night side of the Moon is illuminated
by Earthshine---which
yours truly couldn't fathom at first even
though it's said right in the official caption quoted above.
Credit/Permission: NASA,
before or circa 2009
(uploaded to Wikipedia
by George Watson (AKA User:Dendodge),
2009) /
Public domain.
Image link: Wikipedia:
File:Plane of Ecliptic.jpg.
Local file: local link: moon_clementine.html.
File: Moon file:
moon_clementine.html.