Tinkercad Moon Phase Tool

I am a high school Astronomy teacher. My students often have misconceptions about why the Moon goes through phases. Many of these misconceptions stem from difficulty picturing the Earth, Moon, and Sun from perspectives other than what we see from the surface of the Earth.

I built this Tinkercad tool to give them a set of models that they can manipulate and see what the Moon looks like from above and when viewed from the Earth.

Before learning about Moon phases, my students have learned that, when viewed from above the North Pole, the Earth and Moon rotate and orbit in a counterclockwise direction.

All you need is Tinkercad and students with a sense of wonder (which, I believe, they all do, even if they won't admit it!).

1. Copy the 3-D Earth Design posted on TinkerCad by pk.vishnupriyan07. It can be found at this link: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/39IkDb6OEoS-earth. This is a design that has undergone several remixes by many authors, the original creator was qzectbum)

1. You can just select the Earth from the design above, copy it, and then paste it into your new design Workplane.

1. Once the Earth is there, you'll want to group it using the "BUNDLE" tool so all of the pieces move together.

1. Now, resize the Earth so that it is a sphere with a diameter of 20 mm. To do this, you'll have to set the length, width, and height to 20 mm.

1. The move the Earth so that it is a bit left of the center of the Workplane. The exact location is not important.

In our model, sunlight will be coming in from the right side of the Workplane. To represent this, we'll use the "Round Roof" in the basic shapes toolbox.

1. Place the round roof in the Workplane, then rotate it so that it is "standing" on one of its flat ends.

1. Now stretch this shape so that it spans the entire right side of the Workplane ... and then make it yellow (because the sun, after all, is a yellow dwarf!)

If the sun is on the right side, the left side of the Earth would be experiencing nighttime … so let’s set that up.

1. Put a “half sphere” shape in the Workplane. Then adjust its diameter to 20.5 mm (length and width) and make the height 10.5 mm. This is slightly bigger than the Earth's dimensions so that it covers the Earth.

1. Rotate the sphere 90º - so that the “base” is vertical and facing the sun.

1. Highlight the Earth and the “Half Dome” and use the “Align” tool to align their left sides and center them horizontally and vertically.

1. After they are aligned, click on the “dome” and use the arrow key to move it one step to the left so that it completely covers half of the Earth.

1. To make the nighttime side look a little more like night, change its color to black

Now let’s add the moon…

1. Add a sphere to the Workspace and make its diameter 15 mm (this will not be a scale model!). Also change its color to light gray (it is the Moon after all).

1. Like the Earth, the moon has a daytime and nighttime side.

1. Click on the nighttime side we created for the Earth and copy/paste it into the Workplane.

1. Resize the new copy of the nighttime side so that it is 15.5 mm in length and width and 7.6 mm tall.

1. Repeat the alignment process we did for the Earth. You may not need to do that little nudge to the left.

1. Just to keep things together, click and drag to select the Moon and it’s nighttime side and “Bundle” them.

Now we're going to add a transparent ring to show the Moon's orbital path around the Earth.

1. Add a “Tube” from the shapes gallery to the Workplane.

1. Make the Tube’s height 1 mm, radius 10, and Wall Thickness 0.1. Also, make its color “transparent”.

1. Select the Earth and our new ring and align their centers.

1. Now select the Earth, Moon, and Ring and align their vertical centers. NOTE: Depending on how you bundled things earlier, the nighttime sides may need to be readjusted at this point.

1. With the ring in place, you can move the Moon to any point in its orbit.

View the Workplane from the "Top" position and move the Moon to any point in its orbit.

To see what the moon in this position looks like from the Earth, adjust your perspective so you are looking at the Moon from just above the Earth.

In the images above you can see these perspectives for each of the eight main moon phases.