File talk:Earth-Moon ScaledTo Basketball-Tennisball.png

I would like to explain the reasoning behind why certain image elements were chosen. Instead of cluttering up the File Description, I will do that here:

- A basketball has long been used as a scale reference for the Earth. In recent years, various people like Science YouTuber Derek Muller at Veritasium have been making significant progress toward correcting popular misconceptions about how far the Moon is away from the Earth. The main purpose of this new image file is to take the next obvious step in the basketball comparison to show that the Earth-Moon distance correlates perfectly with the NBA 3-point shooting line.

- As for which court to use in the image, the Houston Rockets were chosen in homage to NASA and Houston Control as being the first and only organization to date to send people to the Moon.

- The basketball image of David Robinson playing for Team USA in the Olympics was chosen for several reasons. Team USA is again an homage to NASA and the country as a whole with the JFK-initiated commitment to go to the Moon. David Robinson is an Annapolis graduate, and this harkens back to the fact that many of the Apollo astronauts were military academy graduates. And the Olympic theme is a tribute to all of humanity, which benefited as a whole from the endeavor as Armstrong's words have emphasized.

- To show how far out of the ecliptic plane that the Moon reaches, the tennis racket was used because this was the perfect length and a natural companion for the tennis ball representing the Moon.

- The Air de Paris balloon was used to represent the Sun because it is a very large balloon and very round, and also an homage to the Montgolfier Brothers who pioneered human flight.

This is the first attempt to present an image showing how the Earth-Moon system scales very well to the basketball-tennis ball/3-point line. Any suggestions for improvement will be appreciated. I went ahead with putting everything I thought would be helpful for this image, and the result is packed very tightly. Some will see this as too cluttered. I hope most will find all of the parts that have been included to be helpful. There is actually more that could be added, because once the Sun is pointed out and the court is taken as the ecliptic then the Moon's orbit rising and falling the height of a tennis racket can be developed further to explain how eclipses will only happen when the Moon's path reaches the court level. A demonstration of this would make for an excellent video. The Sun could be modeled as a bright light off the side of the court.--Tdadamemd (talk) 10:03, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Yesterday this series was completed. This image is one in a series of three images where the Sun, the Earth and the Moon were each scaled down to the size of a basketball and then distances depicted on a basketball court (see 'Other versions' listed in image summary). I hope people find these images to be illuminating and useful.

These three images are a companion to the previous series where all of the planets of the solar system were scaled down to the size of an American football field (File:Solar System scaled to a football field.png). Along with these is the series that compares the order of magnitude difference between sizes of key objects in the solar system (File:SolarSystem OrdersOfMagnitude Sun-Jupiter-Earth-Moon sequenced-loop.gif). Again, any suggestions for improvement to any of these images will be appreciated.--Tdadamemd (talk) 23:51, 9 February 2013 (UTC)