Diameters and Things

Following on from the previous post, the moon has an equatorial circumference of 10917.km according to Nasa, and 10921 if you get your figures from Wikipedia.

The Sun's Diameter is roughly 109 times the Earth's Diameter.  In fact, most peculiarly, it almost perfectly mirrors the figure in kilometres for the Moon.

Using NASA's data:

Sun's Diameter - 1,391,016km
Earth's Diameter - 12,742km
Moon's Diameter - 3,475km

Sun's Diameter divided by the Earth is 1,391,016 / 12,742 = 109.1678


And interestingly, the Diameter of the Sun divided by the Diameter of the Moon works out at 400.2923

So the Moon is 400 times smaller than the sun.

Luckily for us, it's also 400 times closer to us than the sun, so in the sky from Earth, they look exactly the same size.  Which is why we get eclipses.

There's no logical reason for this other than coincidence... but the coincidences just keep piling up...