This project is solely for the purpose of visualization it is not meant to be extremely precise. I hope this helps you visualize the the earth and moon's orbit. Instructions: There is really not much to say here just that you can play around with the rate, you can press the "E" key to show the information about eclipses, and you can press the "D" key to make it flash every time a day has gone by. There are two different viewpoints one of the "overhead" view and the other of the "side" view. Please note: This does not represent any specific year. The year variable just keeps track of how many years the simulation has progressed through. As I said earlier this simulation is not precise so for those of you who care here is a list of all the inaccuracies I've found: Sizes - The earth, sun, and moon are not sized proportionally to each other. In real life, The sun has over 100 times the diameter of the earth and 400 times the diameter of the moon. Distances - The distances between the sun and earth as well as the earth and moon are not sized proportionally to each other or the sizes of the bodies. The reason for both of these inaccuracies is because if I were to size everything proportionally they would either not be visible or not fit on the screen or both. Earth tilt: In the image for the side view the tilt of the earth is not what you would expect if you were viewing at this angle. The purpose of the tilt in the side view is to make it clear which season it is and why. The image of the tilt shown is a strait line from the point on the equator closest to the sun to the point on the equator farthest from the sun. This results in a line travelling strait through the center of the earth. The tilt of the moon's orbit: The moon actually orbits the earth at an angle of 5.1 degrees compared to the earth's orbit plane, however in the "overhead" view the moon moves in a perfect circle even though from this view it would look slightly like an ellipse and in the "side" view the angle appears to be significantly greater than 5.1 degrees. I did this just to make it clearer what was going on. Perfect circles: In this simulation I simplified it by making the earth and the moon orbit in perfect circles rather than ellipses. For the most part this doesn't matter, however it would have an effect on when eclipses could occur because the earth would be moving closer and farther from the sun and the moon would be moving closer and father from the earth. The sun is stationary: In the simulation the sun appears stationary where in real life the moves (such that the center of gravity of our solar system is constant) as well as rotates. Leap year: For the sake of this I was lazy and made it deal with catching up on time on December 21st instead of February. Now I'm sure there are more issues but these are the ones I've found.
