Why does the moon follow us in the car?
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What other far-away thing do you like to look for from the car?
What about...?
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Transcript
Have you seen the moon seem to follow your car?
Trees close by zoom past your window as the car moves. Things near us look like they move a lot.
The moon is very, very far away in space. Our car ride is too small to make it look like the moon moved.
So when you look out the window, the moon stays in almost the same spot. It only seems to ride along with you.
So that's why the moon seems to follow your car. It is so far away that it barely changes place in your window!
For grown-ups: the science
The moon seems to follow because it is very far away, so it hardly looks like it moves when the car moves.
This is parallax: nearby objects shift quickly against the background as an observer moves, while the Moon's great distance makes its apparent position change very little over a car ride. The Moon does move across the sky because Earth rotates, but that change is slow compared with the child's trip.