Distorted plots

Rhett Allain, physics professor and blogger, published a nice article today about the Moon’s orbit. It follows largely the same line of reasoning as my post on the same topic (and the various write-ups I linked to in that post) from a few years ago. I nodded my head as I read through it, until I got to a plot at the end of the article. For much of the article, Allain complains about how the orbit of the Moon as it and the Earth make their way around the Sun is often distorted in textbooks. Like this, which is a frame from an animated GIF in the article. In this image, the Earth-Moon distance is exaggerated, and it looks like the Moon curves away from the Sun when it’s between the Earth and the Sun. To show that this is wrong, he plots portions of the Moon and Earth orbits without exaggerating the Moon-Earth distance: Forgive me, but what the actual fuck? How can you spend over 1000 words complaining about graphical distortions and then produce this? Sure, it’s not the same distortion…