The Earth is larger than the Moon. The Moon's smaller mass means that the gravity on the Moon is only about 1/6 of the gravity at the Earth's surface.

• The Earth is 12,756 km in diameter
• The Moon is 3,476 km in diameter

If the Earth was the size of a basketball, the Moon would be the size of a tennis ball in comparison. However, of all the moons in the solar system, our moon is largest in proportion to the planet it orbits. All other moons, even the ones larger than our moon, are much smaller when compared in proportion to the planets they orbit.

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Figure 2: The positions of earth at the different seasons. Counterclockwise from lower left: summer, fall, winter, spring (northern hemisphere).

The earth’s orbit is called the ecliptic. The plane which contains the ecliptic is the reference plane for the positions of most solar system bodies. Viewed from earth, the ecliptic is the apparent motion of the sun among the stars.
The earth’s equator is a circle going around the earth which is on a plane that is perpendicular to the earth’s axis

The Earth, Sun, and Moon

The Earth
Earth, which is our base from which we look into space, is constantly moving. Understanding this movement is one of the most useful and important things in astronomy.
The earth orbits the sun in an elliptical orbit and the moon orbits the earth with the same kind of orbit. Looking down from the north pole, the earth spins in a counterclockwise direction on an imaginary line called its axis once every day. This accounts for the fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. The earth’s axis is tilted with respect to the plane of its orbit at an angle of about 23.4 degrees. If we position ourselves high above the north pole, we would see that the earth orbits the sun in a counterclockwise motion, coming to the same position among the stars every 365.26 earth days. We would also see that the moon also orbits the earth in a counterclockwise motion.