Starting with this post, each week on Thursday or Friday, we’ll be publishing a “Sky Tonight” column.
Over the previous 48 hours, we’ve posted 2 substacks discussing, at length, this month’s full moon. Both of them reference the full-featured articles on our flagship web portal.
The illustration above, produced with Stellarium, shows the full Harvest supermoon, flanked on the east and west by Jupiter and Saturn respectively. The ecliptic is presented in this view to illustrate the path of the sun and the plane of the solar system.
Note all solar system objects in this view (the moon, Saturn, and Jupiter) are on or near this path. This is neither a coincidence nor an accident, since all these objects orbit the sun (the moon orbits the earth, which orbits the sun). This imaginary path of the ecliptic on the sky is the one-dimensional analog to the two-dimensional plane of the solar system and represents the path…
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