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Although I have been teaching both physics and
earth science for more than 50 years, I just discovered
that I was as ignorant as her students in grasping the
size and distance relationships between the earth and
the moon. Like Tina's students, I had been brainwashed
by faulty diagrams in all of my textbooks and encyclopedias
that all show the earth and the moon less than three earth
diameters apart.
I suggest that all readers of this e-mail do what Tina
suggests in her original e-mail (duplicated below).
Draw an earth-moon diagram on a sheet of notebook paper
with the diameters of the earth and the moon and the
distance between them drawn to scale. Then, based on your
diagram, explain the phases of the moon and the causes of
solar and lunar eclipses.