Calculating the occurrence of solar and lunar eclipses.

Question

Calculating the occurrence of solar and lunar eclipses.

In: 2

Answer 1

It’s fundamentally just geometry. You use the known orbits of the Earth and the Sun, use those with 3d geometry to figure out where each of them is in Earth’s sky, set those locations equal (for a solar eclipse) or opposite (for a lunar one), and solve the resulting equation.

Alternately, you can use approximations like the [saros](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saros_(astronomy)) – a series of eclipses separated by 18 years and a few days – to roughly sketch out when eclipses should occur.