Where the Shadow Fell — Five Millennia of Solar Eclipses
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Charting 11,898 eclipses…
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penumbraumbra
The cone’s dark tip — the umbra — still has width when it lands,<br>so the corridor it draws is solid ink. From inside it the Sun is gone, and the<br>corona shows.
Not to scale — real gaps are 25× wider.
×<br>Annular
penumbraumbraantumbra
The Moon is too far to fill the Sun. The cone closes before the Earth and reopens<br>as the antumbra , leaving a ring a twenty-first of the Sun’s radius<br>— thinner than most pictures of it.
Not to scale — real gaps are 25× wider.
×<br>Hybrid
penumbraumbra
The tip ends exactly on the Earth’s surface: total where the curve rises to<br>meet it, annular at the two ends. Under two per cent apart, so the corridor is<br>drawn as a total’s.
Not to scale — real gaps are 25× wider.
×<br>Partial
penumbraumbra
The dark tip misses the Earth entirely; only the penumbra lands. No corridor<br>— just a wash, drawn as a screen turned down. The median bite takes<br>0.47 of the Sun’s width.
Not to scale — real gaps are 25× wider.
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Saros–inex
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The catalogue as a grid
A saros repeats an eclipse after 18 years and<br>11 days, an inex after 29 years less<br>20. Those are the axes, and reading them forward is how eclipses<br>are predicted.
Saros series →<br>click a number to pick one
Inex series →<br>click a number to pick one
×<br>A saros
223 lunar months: 18 years,<br>11⅓ days. After that the Moon is back at the same phase, at<br>much the same distance, and at much the same place relative to the node where its orbit<br>crosses the Sun’s path — so the eclipse happens again, close enough to look<br>like the same event returning.
The extra third of a day is what keeps it from being the same event. The Earth turns<br>another 120° underneath it, so each return lands about a<br>third of the way further west, and every third return comes back near the same meridian<br>one step along.
A family opens near one pole as a grazing partial, works its way across the face of the<br>Earth over twelve to fifteen centuries, and dies as a grazing partial near the other.<br>Series 126, the column that produces<br>12 August 2026, opens in 1179<br>at 72°S and closes in 2459 at<br>70°N: 72 eclipses, the<br>31 partials among them all at the two ends.
×<br>An inex
358 lunar months: 28 years and<br>345 days. It is the other step you can take and still land on an<br>eclipse, and it behaves nothing like a saros. A saros return stays in the same hemisphere;<br>an inex return crosses to the other one. 12 August 2026<br>falls at 65°N off Iceland; one cell to the right, same row,<br>is 24 July 2055 at 33°S<br>off southern Africa.
Inex families also last far longer. Saros 126 runs<br>1,280 years end to end. Inex 70 has<br>members at both edges of the catalogue, 1998 BCE and<br>2981 CE, and the catalogue runs out before the family does.
The two together are why this is a grid and not a list.<br>38 inexes less 61 saroses is exactly one<br>lunar month, so the pair (saros, inex) can name any eclipse, and can name it only one<br>way.
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