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Credit & Copyright: The Clementine Project
Explanation:
The Plane of the Ecliptic
is well illustrated in this picture from the 1994 lunar
prospecting Clementine spacecraft.
Clementine's star tracker camera image reveals (from right to left)
the Moon lit by
Earthshine, the Sun's corona rising over
the Moon's dark limb, and the planets
Saturn,
Mars,
and Mercury.
The ecliptic plane is defined as the imaginary plane containing the Earth's
orbit around the Sun.
In the course of a year,
the Sun's apparent path
through the sky lies in this plane.
The
Solar System's planetary bodies all
tend to lie near this plane, since they were formed from the Sun's spinning,
flattened, proto-planetary disk.
The snapshot above nicely captures a momentary line-up looking
out along this fundamental plane of our
Solar System.
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NASA Web Site Statements, Warnings, and Disclaimers
NASA Official: Jay Norris. Specific rights apply.
A service of: LHEA at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
Based on Astronomy Picture
Of the Day
Publications with keywords: ecliptic - Solar System
Publications with words: ecliptic - Solar System
See also: