Conic sections with Tinkercad

During science week I saw a conference from an astrophysicist showing us photos of stars. He told us what a reflector telescope is and how it uses a parabolic mirror. So I asked my dad about parabolas and he told me about the conic sections.

Conic sections are different shapes you get by cutting a cone at different angles. I decided to see this by myself using Tinkercad. You can find other posts in the blog talking about Tinkercad if you are interested. It is very easy to use.

These are all the sections I created

When you cut a cone horizontally you get a circle. Here we have represented the circle in yellow.

If you cut a little bit more inclined than horizontal you get an ellipse. Here you can see three different ellipses at different angles in red colour and how the first one compares with the circle. The more you incline the cut, the stretchier it gets. Ellipses are cool because that's the type of orbit planets do around the Sun

If you keep inclining the cut eventually you reach the same angle as the cone. Here you can see the cut (light blue) compared to the original cone (purple). This cut produces a parabola.

This is what the parabola looks like. Another place where you see parabolas in nature is in the trajectory of projectiles. 

Finally if you cut even more inclined you get hyperbola. You can see here how different the hyperbola looks from the parabola.

The post is now coming to an end. So, I hope you enjoyed my project about conic sections.