[ELI5] How do we predict solar and lunar eclipse?
In: Mathematics
The earth goes around the sun in a cycle.
The moon goes around the earth in a cycle.
The cycles are running together. So if you looked over a long enough time, you’d realize they’re two parts of a much bigger cycle.
So if you wrote down what the moon and the sun were doing at a particular point in the cycle, you’d know what it would be doing at a that same point in the next cycle.
And the sun or moon suddenly disappearing from the sky is something a lot of people would write down.
This is how ancient peoples were able to predict eclipses, long before they figured out that the earth was going around the sun, and sun was going around the earth. They noticed the cycle.
The difference from modern is that now we know what causes the cycle and we’ve measured the things more exactly.
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