Summer 2024 Decorative Border Information
Basic Information
This represents the paths of the inner planets-Mercury (gray path), Venus (yellow), and Mars (red) with respect to the Earth (blue, not to scale naturally; artistic license taken to give it prominence). The time between each consecutive plot is approximately 6 months.
Note the aesthetically pleasing spirals that are obtained. The planets orbit the sun in elliptical (but nearly circular) orbits. On the other hand, the motion with the respect to Earth is less simple.
The ancients observed that the planets moved with respect to the "fixed" stars and for this reason these objects were given the name "planets" or wanderers. The loops that appear represent the phenomena known as retrograde motion, where the planet appears to move backwards or opposite to it normal direction of motion for a short period of time. This coincides with its closest aproach to Earth.
Code
The code to make this image will added shortly; meanwhile, feel free to play with the underlying concepts at the following link. The code at this link assumes circular orbits around the Sun; the code use to generate the above images incorporated the elliptical orbits as well as random starting locations of the planets around the sun.
If the code does not run at the above link, feel free to copy and past the code into at rdrr.io/snippets.