We predict eclipses for 2000 years. But how?

Imagine: you are the man of antiquity, some kind of Neanderthal, and your faithful sun suddenly and unexpectedly darkened. You're scared. You think: "What if it never comes back? What we have angered God... ancestors? Oh, and here it is back. Carried". But then, years later, this repeats. You lose faith in the constancy of the sun and start to record when these events happen. Centuries pass and finally get the picture, thanks to which early civilization was able to predict when they occur strange events.

"the idea that this is no accident, incredible," said Jonathan Seitz, associate Professor of history at Drexel. "Mesopotamy the first to realize this, because they had a habit of recording everything. They did it because I felt that it makes sense — it's not just random natural phenomena."

Through the records that started as early as 700 BC, Mesopotamia were able to determine the length of the cycle of Saros — the interval between when the Moon, Earth and Sun line up for an Eclipse. The cycle occurs every 18 years, 10 days (11 in the leap years) and 8 hours change with them, and the shadow on the Ground. These additional eight hours means that the position of the Eclipse changes with time as the Earth's rotation.

Although the ancient astronomers could not observe all the iterations of the cycle of the Saros (Eclipse can occur in the middle of the oceans or uninhabited areas), they were able to clearly determine the time intervals when there may come a blackout. At this stage of history, they just found out when this can happen. Why and how — about that later.

the life of the Greeks

Fast Forward to Ancient Greece. For such thinkers as Aristotle and others, was not enough to know something was going on. It was as equally important to know why this is happening. "Greeks are very interested in causality," says Zeitz. The value of the Eclipse was less important than other factors. "For them, you don't understand something until you can explain it."

Greek observations helped figure out how the planets move and that the Earth's form field. Without telescopes they were still thinking about the moon as a luminous heavenly body, like our solid house, but determined by its motion relative to the Earth. And although they thought that the Earth was the center of the Universe, they realized that the Eclipse is the shadow of the new moon cast by the Sun to the Earth.

The Methods developed by Aristotle and Ptolemy to understand the Eclipse, was used up until Copernicus and Newton came on the scene hundreds of years later.

"But that doesn't mean that since that time nothing has happened," adds Zeitz. People accumulated knowledge of ancient cultures, accumulated knowledge and began to improve in the middle ages. "In the Islamic world, in particular, they paid great attention to astronomy and astrology, developed the astrolabe, they lined up the angles in heaven and tried to improve the system," says Zeitz.

Later thinkers like Tycho Brahe built a giant quadrants to make more accurate measurements of the movement of the Sun during eclipses, and some methods were used for measurements of eclipses, which we still use today. "They used the pinhole camera in the middle ages, which allows you to measure the power of the Eclipse," says Zeitz.

Europe, of course, was not the only place where seen Eclipse. In China began predicting eclipses almost at the same time as that of the Mediterranean people, however, were open, and diagrams of eclipses, thanks to the long Chronicles. There is evidence that Maya was his way of watching the Eclipse but almost all of their records have been brutally destroyed by the conquistadors during the European invasion of America.

Despite a good understanding of eclipses, most cultures consider them bad omens. Interpretation (slowly) began to change with the advent of telescopes that showed the topography of the moon and allowed us to predict eclipses more accurately. In fact, in the 1700 years of the astronomer Edmund Halley made a map of future eclipses, and published it in the hope that the General public will not panic when the Sun disappears and observers will be able to collect more data on how long the blackout will continue in different places. The modern era of observations of eclipses, finally, began.

Our time

"the Method that we use now, based on what people have invented in the 19th century," says Ernie Wright, an expert on visualization at NASA. People who began to use relatively modern methods of calculation for prediction of eclipses, was Friedrich Bessel and William Chauvin.

"Bessel came up with the basic maths that we use, in 1820, and Chauvin put it in modern form in 1855".

Today we can get even more specific information, thanks to our understanding of the shape of the moon. The moon — contrary to all the elementary school pictures over which you sweated, not banana-shaped or a perfect sphere. Like Earth, the Moon has mountains and plains, because of which its form is slightly rough around the edges, and thus the surface is paved unevenly.

"Methods of the 19th century suggests that the Moon is smooth and that all observers are at sea level," says Wright. "Such simplification is necessary to do, if you are doing calculations with a pencil on paper."

From the late 1940s until 1963 astronomer named Charles Burleigh watts spent countless hours mapping variations that are manifested on the surface of the moon, and watched the reliefs on the outer edge of the moon as seen from Earth. His detailed maps helped to more precisely predict eclipses. But the shadow of the Eclipse was, as it turned out, not oval, and many-sided polygon in which each corner corresponds to the valley on the body of the moon.

Then it took NASA. The lunar reconnaissance Orbiter of the Agency, based on the work of Watt, in detail, reflect the topography of the moon, which would have been impossible to make images taken on earth.

Wright took these data on the shape of the moon, the topography and the positions of the Sun, moon and Earth to create incredibly detailed and accurate picture of where falls the shadow of the Eclipse in the United States.

This Eclipse has become the most watched total Eclipse in history. And after humanity has spent thousands of years observing and recording eclipses, there are still many things that scientists hope to find out.

"Recently, we started talking about that do not know the exact size of the Sun," says Wright. "It turned out that eclipses are extremely sensitive method for the measurement of the radius of the Sun. The radius of the Sun is about 696 000 km. But if you change it to 125 kilometers, change the duration of a total Eclipse for a second."

Today, when people have the ability to accurately observe how the shadow of the Eclipse crosses land, it is necessary to thank all those generations of people who made this possible; from observers who did not know what was happening, who lived for hundreds of years, to the people who built the satellites and made accurate maps of eclipses.