How does the motion of the moon form a clover leaf path?

Question

I was told by a teacher that hte moon makes a clover leaf every 18 years?

Answer 1

Haven't done this, but try drawing out the path of the moon around an Earth moving along the x axis of a Cartesean graph with the units of the x axis in degrees. The Earth would start at some arbitrary zero degrees point and move along the x axis from there through 360 degrees, which would account for revolving around the Sun for one year.

Meanwhile, graph the moon rotating around the Earth; with one complete rotation taking 28 days, or about 28 degrees travel of the Earth on the x axis (assuming about one deg per day angular velocity for the Earth).

Remember, the Moon's position on the graph must correspond with its position relative to the x axis and not relative to the Earth. Relative to the Earth will simply give you a circle. You will need to do a bit of math to make the path relative to the x axis.

My guess (hypothesis) is that the path of the Moon over that graph paper will look something like a clover leaf. But as I say, I haven't tested that guess; so I don't really know. If you are really interested, you can try it and see what you get.

Answer 2

The Moon goes around the Earth 12 times while the Earth goes around the Sun once. If you looked at that motion from millions of miles above the solar system, the Moon's path around the Sun would be a wavy line, sometimes being closer to the Sun than the Earth and sometimes being farther. But it would not look like a clover leaf; there would be no loops, just a wavy line because the Moon is 400 times closer to the Earth than the Sun is.

Answer 3

tryrygtgfgrty