A Visual Guide to Lunar Movement with Stephen Wolfram

Here's the Moon going around the Earth. It's kind of a spoke, a series of spokes shown here. And it's colored red whenever it goes through the plane of the ecliptic. It's like a wheel that's been tipped a bit. And when the wheel, when the spokes on the wheel are horizontal, they're going through the plane of the ecliptic. Now let's look at what happens over the course of about a year. So here we are looking at a dot for where the Moon is each day. And the dot is redder if the Moon is closer to the plane of the ecliptic that day. But this gives the idea that there are places where in that orbit, there are places where the Moon is in the plane of the ecliptic. So it's color red here and out of the plane of the ecliptic. So it's lighter colored. So now we can start to see how eclipses work. The basic point is that there's a solar eclipse whenever the Moon is both positioned between the Earth and the sun and it's in the plane of the ecliptic.