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Short Answer: The gravitation of Jupiter and all the other planets makes Kepler’s third law a bit less accurate than it would be if their gravity were zero. The gravitational interaction between the planets, however, doesn’t have much effect on either the period or semi-major axis of any of the planets, especially in the short term. Long Answer: You might ...

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I must say that I agree with you, this way of derivate the Kepler law is not the most intuitive, it's maybe for this reason they specify: "revisited". R1: The reason is stated at the very begin of the chapter, where you derive the relation between $r$ and the angle to the perihelion $\theta$ for the general case of an ellipse (Eq 3 in your book in ...

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Is there a problem here though? For any given month won't the full Moon oscillate between low and high above the horizon at midnight on an 18.6 year cycle? No. The full moon is always opposite to the sun (within 5.2 degrees, the angle between the moon's orbit and the ecliptic). So, when in summer the sun is high in the sky, the full moon will be low, ...

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The transit of a star when it reaches its highest point is called the upper culmination and when it reaches its lowest point is called the lower culmination. I think both are referred to as meridian transits.

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