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Reply	Peter Oliver says: If you take the curved shadow on each image of the moon, extrapolate it to a circle and put a dot in the centre of it, now join these dots up, it will be a straight line or a smooth slight curve, this represents the orbit of the earth with respect to that of the moon, as you can see, the earth and moons orbit are actually at a slight angle with respect to the sun, but only slight. This angle explains the different edges of the chadow first contacting and then leaving the moon.I am reasonably sure of this but not from any professional astronomical experience, any of them care to comment?  (no votes) Tags: planet earth.
	posted on 2007-07-02 10:08:00 | Report abuse

Reply	Anonymous says: I think you will find it is the rotation of the Earth, rather than its orbit. As you were standing (presumably) at a mid latitude and this event takes some time, your (camera's) position and orientation swung around quite significantly, so that at the end of the event, *you* were at a different angle to it. Use a globe to visualise the situation and it should become clearer.  (no votes) Tags: planet earth.
	posted on 2009-02-04 06:30:00 | Report abuse

Reply	Anonymous says: Hello,The explanation is straightforward. The Earth's shadow and the Moon appear both as round disks in the sky. The size of the Earth's shadow is roughly four times bigger than the disc of the moon. During a lunar eclipse the Moon moves through the Earth's shadow. Depending on which part of Earth's disk-shaped shadow the Moon happens to pass through, you will see different orientations of the bright/dark boundary on the face of the moon as the eclipse progresses. Another way to envision it is to imagine what happens when you overlap two circles, one four times bigger than the other. As the small circle passes across the big circle, the overlap or intersection line changes orientation.  (no votes) Tags: planet earth.
	posted on 2009-05-07 18:01:00 | Report abuse