File:Plane of Ecliptic.jpg

Plane_of_Ecliptic.jpg(640 × 449 pixels, file size: 227 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

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Summary

Description
English: "The Plane of Ecliptic is illustrated in this Clementine star tracker camera image which 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 planetary bodies of our solar system 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."; the image is color enhanced,[1] probably several frames taken by the b-star camera and on 5 March 1994, 21 hours and 10-20 minutes on its 66th orbit (see e.g. iba0043v.66 and iba0059v.066 at [1]). The two faint stars left and right in the top part of the image should be Fomalhaut and Diphda.
Source http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap960921.html
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/gallery/Ecliptic.jpg
Author The Clementine Project, commissioned by NASA

Licensing

Public domain This file is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (See Template:PD-USGov, NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy.)
Warnings:
  1. 30 Years Ago: Clementine Changes Our View of the Moon. NASA (February 16, 2024). Retrieved on July 21, 2025.

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current22:59, 13 May 2015640 × 449 (227 KB)Jcpag2012converted from GIF file with 100% quality using GIMP

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