A Private Universe

The Earth is a fascinating and mysterious object. It took a lot of discoveries for us to come to know what we know about it and its axes today. A classic question is "what are the reasons for the seasons?" A lot of people use this play on words in terms of holidays like Christmas, for example "What is the reason for the Christmas season?" Today we are going to talk about it in a more literal sense. We have season on earth because we are on a tilted axes. This tilt causes us to get the season we experience. The earth is always "pointing" (tilted) to one side as it goes around the sun. Sometimes the sun is in the direction that the earth is pointing, but not at other times. The earth receives indirect light from the sun because of this tilt. What this means is the light is angled when it hits us, it doesn't hit us straight on. This indirect source of sunlight with the tilt of our axes causes the seasons, in other words they are the "reason for the seasons."

Another fascinating part of our planted is our moon. We only have one but our moon goes through different phases. A great question that a student may as is "how are phases of the moon created?" Phases of the moon are created based on where the sun, earth and moon are in correlation to each other. What I mean by this is as the moon rotates, around the earth, it is being illuminated from various angles by the sun. These various angles create the different phases of the moon we see at night throughout the year. For an example, at the new moon phase, the earth is directly between the moon and the sun, that is why it's so dark. Use the diagram below as reference.