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To: The_Media_never_lie; ctdonath2; ETL
It does not look quite round. Or, as they say in the tire business “out of round”.

Neither does our own Moon slightly before and slightly after being a Full Moon.

It's called "gibbous." Caused by the body casting a shadow upon itself. Ever notice?

Regards,

43 posted on 10/04/2015 1:44:05 AM PDT by alexander_busek (Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.)
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To: alexander_busek; The_Media_never_lie; ctdonath2

You know, I think you might be right on that. I didn’t look carefully enough at it earlier to notice the shadow along the right edge. I just assumed, that it didn’t have enough mass or gravity to make it more rounded. But even Earth isn’t perfectly round.
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“The shape of Earth approximates an oblate spheroid, a sphere flattened along the axis from pole to pole such that there is a bulge around the equator.[95] This bulge results from the rotation of Earth, and causes the diameter at the equator to be 43 kilometres (27 miles) larger than the pole-to-pole diameter.[96] Thus the point on the surface farthest from Earth’s center of mass is the summit of the equatorial Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador. [94][97][98][99]

The average diameter of the reference spheroid is about 12,742 kilometres (7,918 miles), which is approximately 40,000 km/pi, because the meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole through Paris, France.[100]

Local topography deviates from this idealized spheroid, although on a global scale these deviations are small compared to Earth’s radius”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth#Shape
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“Because of the combined effects of gravitation and rotation, the Earth’s shape is roughly that of a sphere slightly flattened in the direction of its axis. For that reason, in cartography the Earth is often approximated by an oblate spheroid instead of a sphere. The current World Geodetic System model uses a spheroid whose radius is 6,378.137 km [3,963.2 miles] at the equator and 6,356.752 km [3,950 miles] at the poles.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spheroid


44 posted on 10/04/2015 3:12:56 AM PDT by ETL (Too many idiots, not enough time)
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