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THE MOON'S ORBITAL DANCE - IN THE TYCHOSIUM
Dear friends,
I've been "walking on the moon" for the last few weeks and - step by step - my lunar dwellings have turned into a "fantabulous moondance"...
The Tychosium interactive simulator has already proved to be of enormous help to visualize
the actual orbital motions in our solar system. This time, I must say that the TYCHOSIUM has surpassed itself in terms of illustrative / explicative power; our Moon has notoriously exhibited the most complex (and thus misunderstood) "orbital behavior" of them all. To be sure, even Sir Isaac gave up trying to wrap his head around our Moon's observed precessional motions - what with its truly daunting complexity (for any earthly observer) that has haunted the astronomers of this world for many centuries:
"The problem of the Moon's motion is dauntingly complex, and Newton never published an accurate gravitational model of the Moon's apsidal precession." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_ ... ing_orbits
Therefore, I hope no one will blame me for not explaining EXACTLY
WHY the Moon moves the way it does. As I have often stated in previous writings, the TYCHOS model doesn't pretend to formulate a "TOE" (Theory of Everything"): however, at this point, I will confidently say that the TYCHOS model has already proved to be decidedly superior than the so-called Copernican model - insofar as its geometrical configuration has been shown to be far more consistent with empirical observation than the heliocentric theory - as "established" by Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Einstein et al. Quite frankly, I didn't expect the TYCHOS model to go as far as demonstrating and depicting -
graphically - the actual motions of our Moon, yet this is what the TYCHOSIUM 3D simulator (patiently elaborated by Patrik and yours truly) is able to do today.
To watch the afore-mentioned "fantabulous moondance" in action, here is what you will have to do (you won't regret spending a little time doing this, I can assure you! What you will witness with your own eyes is, as Patrik wrote above, "a simple beauty of nature"!) :
- Open the
TYCHOSIUM 3D simulator :
https://codepen.io/pholmq/full/XGPrPd
- Use the wheel of your mouse to enlarge the Earth-Moon system (to a size similar to that shown in the below screenshot). Next:
STEP1 : Set the speed of the simulator to "1 second = 1 year" (as shown below) - and start the Tychosium by checking the "RUN" box. You will now see our Moon's orbit performing its lovely precessional moondance - as it alternatively drifts from perigee to apogee (i.e. closer or further from Earth).
STEP2 : Check the "Lines" box - and then check the "Moon" box (as shown below). You will now see a most beautiful 'spirographic' pattern getting traced and gradually forming a neat, symmetrical "donut" - or, more technically-speaking, a
toroid :
If you now uncheck the "Lines" box and reduce the TRACE size to "0.1", here's how the TYCHOSIUM will plot the Moon's toroidal orbit :
- TOROIDAL_Moon_Path_01.jpg (155.03 KiB) Viewed 1937 times
A most astounding aspect of all this - is that the observed value of the oscillation of the Moon's
perigee (closest to furthest perigee) is 14044 km*. Well, this "just happens" to be almost precisely the annual distance covered by Earth (14036 km) as stipulated in the TYCHOS model ! Moreover, the observed value of the mean / total oscillation of the Moon
from perigee to apogee is 42108 km (which is exactly 3X 14036 km !).
*As more thoroughly expounded here: viewtopic.php?p=2409064#p2409064
In my TYCHOS book - which was released more than a year ago - I submitted this (bold yet cautious) question: was Kepler perhaps wrong when he stated that all orbits are elliptical - and that all the celestial bodies (planets & moons) of our solar system "ACCELERATE or DECELERATE" as they find themselves closer or further from the Sun? Well, I have already fully disproved this latter Keplerian theory - by pointing out that Earth
clearly appears to ACCELERATE (in relation to the Sun) between June and July, that is, at a time when Earth is furthest from the Sun*. Kepler's "laws" are therefore definitively falsified.
*This fact is empirically proven by the analemma, i.e. the 8-shaped pattern that the Sun traces yearly in our skies.
As for Kepler's idea of "elliptical" orbits, here's a quite conceptual (and slightly humorous) graphic of mine showing that our Moon's orbit needs not to be elliptical at all. You will have to imagine that bicycle wheel to be the Moon's orbit, while "God" wiggles his forefinger and makes the (tilted) bicycle wheel spin around. The pink section on the bicycle wheel represents a "heavier" part of the lunar globe which might cause the Moon's orbit to bob up and down by about 5° (just as we observe the Moon's orbit to be tilted in relation to the ecliptic). Of course, you'll also have to imagine Earth being located around the axis of the bicycle wheel. In any event, this doesn't mean that the shape of the bicycle wheel (i.e. the Moon's orbit) is elliptical ! (in the TYCHOSIUM, of course, the Moon's orbit is perfectly circular).
- BicycleWheel_MOON_orbit_01.jpg (44.63 KiB) Viewed 1937 times
The "N1" and "N2" dots are the famed nodes of the Moon's orbit which, of course, determine when a solar eclipse will occur. In these last weeks, in fact, I have worked at making these nodes coincide with the ACTUAL solar eclipses recorded over the centuries - with some pretty good success (see below).
Here's a gif animation I found on Wikipedia. I find it quite useful to show how we earthly observers may (erroneously) interpret any given circular orbit (as viewed from Earth) as being elliptical. Imagine yourself standing at the Earth's equator, circling by 360° once a day
(you are that green dot moving horizontally back and forth / left to right in the below gif). The blue and red dots ("planets") will appear to revolve around elliptical orbits - although they may well be, in reality, perfectly circular:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipse
Let me now quote a short section of my
TYCHOS book:
In the TYCHOS model, the orbital speed of Mars is shown to be uniform and constant since it always returns at (near-)equidistant
* points of its “opposition ring”. Hence, those “elliptical orbits” and “accelerating / decelerating orbital speeds” (as promulgated by Kepler’s “Laws of planetary motion”) could well be illusory and may have to be revised, or possibly discarded altogether. Before Kepler’s laws came along, astronomers all over the world had been relentlessly pursuing the ideal concept of uniform circular motion. In fact so had Kepler himself before he started stretching and squeezing those recalcitrant Martian motions (observed by Tycho Brahe) in order to make them obey his ever-more-complex equations.
[* Note: by "(near-)equidistant" I refer to how Mars returns to opposition in the TYCHOS at similar longitudinal separations - although of course always at different distances from Earth, as illustrated in my book - see the "Mars opposition ring" diagram].
So Kepler actually PREFERRED (the quite natural notion) that all orbits are perfectly circular! But what about Kepler's ultimate claim that "all orbits are elliptical"? Well, under the TYCHOS model, it is easily understood just WHY all planetary orbits surrounding us will APPEAR to be elliptical: since Earth moves very slowly (at about 1.6 km/h) around its PVP orbit, all our surrounding planets (and moons) will seem to move slightly faster or slower (against the "fixed" stars) depending on the direction of their motions in relation to Earth. Simple as that!
Here's a diagram that I made a while ago - showing why the Moon will APPEAR (as viewed from Earth) to "slightly speed up or slow down" (i.e. to move at fluctuating speeds) - depending on whether it moves in the same/ or opposed direction of Earth's 1.6-km-h-motion) :
- MOON_speedvariations_02.jpg (142.59 KiB) Viewed 1937 times
In any case, dear friends, the TYCHOSIUM is slowly but surely becoming the most accurate digital simulator of our solar system. I have verified the solar eclipses since the 16th century - and all the way to those predicted for the 30th century (i.e. over a 1400-year-timespan) - and for now, they are remarkably precise (within about 1° or so
*). You may actually verify this by yourselves by using the "Elongation" function in the TYCHOSIUM. More work is needed, for sure, (to achieve absolute accuracy) but consider this: if my working postulation that Earth travels at 1.6km/h were totally wrong, these solar eclipses would be "off" by many, many degrees (since Earth would move, in those 1400 years, by about 20 million km in the opposite direction of the Sun)!
*Note that for the TYCHOSIUM to show the solar eclipses within a 1°precision "tolerance" (vis-à-vis the existing solar eclipse tables which list UTC timestamps for all eclipses) may well be an accceptable error margin, since the latitude & longitude of any given eclipse can differ by +/- 2°depending on the observer's earthly location:
- MOON_perspectives_from_Earth.jpg (127.41 KiB) Viewed 1925 times
All in all, I am more than happy (in fact, happier than ever) with the TYCHOS model's consistency with empirically-verifiable reality.
