Had someone (not a flat earther but someone who questions everything) hold an egg up to a globe, and shine a light behind it. No matter the angle, the shadow would not get extremely smaller than the egg. How is a huge moon casting such a small dark shadow during the eclipse, specificallythe path of totality? I know there’s an explanation, but could you so I can go explain to him like he’s 1?
Thanks!!!
In: Planetary Science
The egg should be around 110 egg-diameters away from the globe. Did the person doing the demo get the distance right? And if they did, is the light source an appropriate size and distance away? Things cast different shadows at different distances and lighting conditions.
[Show him this picture.](https://live.staticflickr.com/5132/5507649409_f498285c21_b.jpg) I bet the moon is smaller/farther away from the Earth than you guys were thinking in your demo. It’s not about just the angle it’s about the *distance.*
**If your egg is 2.5 inches long, it would have to be held 22 feet away from the globe** for the shadow to be accurate. Is that what you were doing? If you were holding the egg closer than the moon really is, then yes of course the shadow is going to be larger too.
The short answer is that by sheer coincidence, the sun and the moon appear the exact same size in our horizon. The sun is bigger but further away and the moon is closer but smaller. That ratio is such that they appear almost exactly the same size. Because if this, they have to line up perfectly for totality. If they are misaligned even slightly, the moon will not fully cover up the sun.
The moon is 200-300,000 miles away, the sun is ~93 million miles away. Do some math and get a model of the same scale and you’ll see closer to the true results
It’s a matter of scale. If you don’t have sizes & distances that are all scaled the same, then you’ll get results that don’t reflect reality.
Hold your thumb out at arm’s length.
Close one eye and line your thumb up with something in the background.
Close the other eye and open the first one. Your thumb will appear to move relative to the background. This is called parallax.
In the path of totality, the Moon is perfectly aligned with the Sun. On one side, it only partially blocks the sun, and on the other, it partially blocks the other edge of the Sun.
The Sun is so much further away than the Moon that when you change position on the surface of the Earth, the Moon appears to move more than the Sun does.
Latest Answers