None of the planets really has a terribly elliptical orbit. I think pluto's was the worst, and we ALL know what sort of fate IT met. As such, the foci are very close to the center of the ellipse.
Wikipedia has a good picture of what it looks like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:OrbitalEccentricityDemo.svgMost of the planets in our solarsystem have an eccentricity (e) around like .1 or .2 or something... I wonder....hm... I should have the data here somewhere...
Yep!
Mercury: e = 0.206
Venus: e = 0.009
Earth: e = 0.017
Mars: e = 0.093
Jupiter: e = 0.048
Saturn: e = 0.054
Uranus: e = 0.047
Neptune: e = 0.009
Pluto: e = 0.249
If we disregard Pluto (who's not even a planet any more....sissy), and Mercury (because there are other problems with Mercury), the planet with the highest eccentricity (least circular orbit) is Mars, and it's less than .1. So, this means that the sun is off from the center of Mars' orbit by... about .14 Au, which, in the grand scheme of things, really isn't much.
It is, however, enough for Keppler to determine that the planets rotated in elliptical patterns, not circular patterns. But that is a story for another day.
wink Oh, and Mercury is insane partly because of general relativity and the mass of the sun causing a warp in the fabric of space-time.
~Kayle
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