It has to do with the tilt of the Earth’s axis. The moon is actually slightly tilted relative to Earth’s orbit around the sun. So, when it passes between us and the sun, sometimes it will cover up most of the sun (a total eclipse), and sometimes only a little bit of it (a partial eclipse). And sometimes we’ll be on the far side of the moon from where it passes in front of the sun and won’t see anything (a no-eclipse). And how does that happen Why doesn’t it always align itself in such a way that there is an eclipse once every month Good questions! The reason for this has to do with some details about how gravity works. It turns out that if you have two objects orbiting each other, they tend to line up so that one body never passes right through another body’s shadow. So, since both Earth and Moon are orbiting around each other, they will stable orbits so that neither ever crosses into each others’ shadows while they are doing their orbits around each other. But because they’re also orbiting around different things at different speeds [Earth goes faster as it’s bigger], this alignment is not exactly
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