Image:Phases of the Moon.png

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[edit] Summary

Diagram illustrating various phases of the Moon in their order of appearance stating from the New Moon and progressing through Crescent, First Quarter, and Gibbous to reach the Full Moon. It is followed by Gibbous, Last Quarter and Crescent to complete full circle at the New Moon again.

The dotted circle around the Earth shows the Moon's orbit. The dotted brown line illustrates moon's trajectory. The solid ivory line passing through the earth is indicative of Earth's orbit around the Sun. Notice that this graphical representation can be misleading, as the Earth & Moon's path around the Sun is actually always concave towards the Sun[1].

GFDL/PD images

The diagram utilises following GFDL images:

The Moon: Image:Moon-001.jpg and Image:Moon PIA00302.jpg
The Earth: Image:Earth Western Hemisphere.jpg

Reference: The Royal Geographical Society - (ISBN 0540084050)

[edit] Licensing

I, the author of this work, hereby publish it under the following licenses:

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".