The JavaScript Solar Eclipse Explorer can compute the local circumstances for every solar eclipse visible from a city for any century from -1499 to 3000 (1500 BCE to 3000 CE). When was the last total eclipse visible from Paris? When is the next total eclipse visible from Los Angeles? These questions and many others can be answered easily using this new web tool. Pick a geographic location and search for all eclipses visible from that spot over several thousand years.
Begin by selecting one of the geographic areas below and follow the instructions on that page.
The Eclipse Explorer is based on the JavaScript Solar Eclipse Calculator created by Chris O'Byrne and Stephen McCann. The original calculator predicts the local circumstances for any single eclipse over the period 1970 to 2039 for a geographic position supplied by the user.
The Eclipse Explorer presented here features drop-down menus for city coordinates and buttons to select any century from -1499 to 3000 (1500 BCE to 3000 CE). It can be used to explore the frequencey and circumstances of all solar eclipses visible from any location on Earth. The Eclipse Explorer was developed by Chris O'Byrne and Fred Espenak.
The Besselian elements and values of ΔT used in Solar Eclipse Explorer are the same as those used by Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses: -1999 to +3000. For the purposes of calculating eclipse circumstances from a given place, the growing uncertainty in the value of ΔT and the corresponding longitude become unacceptably large outside time period of -1499 to 3000 (1500 BCE to 3000 CE).
Permission is freely granted to reproduce this data when accompanied by an acknowledgment:
"Eclipse Predictions by Fred Espenak and Chris O'Byrne (NASA's GSFC)"
