How can we predict lunar eclipse

Scientists had been trying to predict eclipses for a long time. Just when they first succeeded is a bit unclear, though. But lunar eclipses are easier to predict. There are stories that the Chinese were predicting solar eclipses more than 4, years ago, but no confirmation. An eclipse in BC that stopped a war supposedly was predicted by Thales, a Greek scientist.

Many modern-day scientists doubt that, however. The first confirmed prediction was made by Edmond Halley, using the laws of gravity devised by Isaac Newton. Halley forecast that an eclipse would cross England on May 3rd, And he was right. Listen to today's episode of StarDate on the web the same day it airs in high-quality streaming audio without any extra ads or announcements.

Skip to main content. Why and how would have to come much later. Enter the Greeks. It was equally as important to know why it was occurring.

Greek observations helped figure out how planets move and that the shape of the Earth is a sphere. Without telescopes, they still thought of the moon as a luminous heavenly body, vastly different from our rocky home, but they figured out its relative motion compared to Earth. And even though they thought that the Earth was the center of the Universe, they figured out that an eclipse is the shadow of a new Moon cast by the sun onto the Earth.

Techniques developed by Aristotle and Ptolemy to understand eclipses were in use all the way up until Copernicus and Newton stepped on the scene hundreds of years later. Later, thinkers like Tycho Brahe built giant quadrants to make more accurate measurements of the movement of the Sun during eclipses, and some people used techniques to measure the eclipse that we still use today.

Europe was far from the only place to notice that eclipses were happening. China developed their own eclipse predictions at around the same time as people in the Mediterranean, paralleling the discovery of the patterns of eclipses thanks to their long history of record-keeping.

There is evidence that the Mayans also had ways of measuring eclipses, but virtually all their records were brutally destroyed by conquistadors during the European invasion of the Americas.

Despite greater understanding of eclipses, most cultures still saw them as bad omens. Interpretations slowly started to change with the advent of telescopes, which revealed the topography of the Moon and allowed eclipse predictions to get much more precise. The modern era of eclipse observing had finally begun. The people who started using more modern calculations to predict the eclipse paths were Friedrich Bessel and William Chauvenet.

The moon—contrary to every elementary-school drawing you ever labored over—is not in fact, shaped like a banana or a perfect sphere. His detailed maps helped eclipse predictions get even more precise. Then, NASA took it up a notch.