The Basics: What is a Solar Eclipse and Why Should we Care?
What is a Solar Eclipse?
What is a Solar Eclipse?
What is a Solar Eclipse?
What is a Solar Eclipse?
A solar eclipse happens from our perspective when the moon goes in front of the sun.
Of course, any object can eclipse any other object depending on distance and perspective. I can eclipse a cat from your perspective if I walk in front of it. You can also eclipse a hundred-foot tree with your thumb if the tree is far enough away. You can do the same with a mountain, or a million galaxies for that matter. The action of eclipse is an action of perspective. There is a distinctive difference in these analogies and the reality of the solar eclipse. Sticking my thumb out may eclipse a tree, but it does not cast a perfect small tree-like shadow. Also, the tree is not an enormous cosmic light furnace nor my thumb an orbiting satellite.
The alignment of sun and moon to our perspective, and the shadow cast by their alignment are what make solar eclipses peculiar. The sun is 400 times bigger than the moon and also 400 times further away. During a complete solar eclipse, these two objects line up and the shadow cast on earth is a small, perfect representation of that spherical union. When the Sun is in total eclipse, it's the only time when we can stare at the sun without damaging our eyes. It is also the only time that the Corona of the sun is visible.
Lunar eclipses are very different. In lunar eclipses, the moon enters the earth’s shadow. That is a darkening of the lunar surface, not an obscuring of the surface, as what happens in a solar eclipse.
The Shadow
What is a Solar Eclipse?
What is a Solar Eclipse?
One of the oddest elements of the total solar eclipse is the nature of that darkest part of the shadow which reaches the earth. In our daily lives, we are accustomed to shadows that are either larger than the object casting the shadow, or roughly the same size. But the moon's umbral shadow during a total solar eclipse is anywhere from ½ mile to 150 miles wide, far smaller than the diameter of the moon.
You can experiment with this yourself. Try to artificially cast a shadow that is smaller than the object you are shining the light on. Try with a flashlight and a golf ball. It doesn't work, at least visibly.
New Moons and orbits
Partial Solar Eclipses
Partial Solar Eclipses
Solar eclipses only happen at a new moon. That’s when the Moon is closest to the plane of the Earth's orbit. If the Moon were in a perfectly circular orbit and in the same orbital plane as Earth, there would be total solar eclipses every new moon. But because the Moon's orbit is tilted at about 5 degrees to Earth's orbit, its shadow usually misses Earth. This creates both geographic variation and rarity.
The moon varies in distance every month from earth from about 222,000 miles to 253,000 miles away. Difference in distance changes the nature of eclipses. The moon is closest to the earth for total eclipses and farther away for ring of fires
Solar (and lunar) eclipses happen during eclipse “seasons”. Eclipse seasons occur every year separated by 173-day spans (though you’ll often see 177 day intervals for actual eclipses). Two eclipse seasons make up an eclipse (Draconic) year of 346.62 days. Some kind of solar eclipse will happen during each of these seasons. Like lunar years, draconic years rotate through our solar year. The beginning of the lunar and draconic dates happen differently on our common calendar every day. As of this writing, for instance, the Chinese New Year was on Jan 22 and will be different each year. The Draconic calendar is similarly odd, but I assume it is new year’s is probably near April 17 here in 2023.
Partial Solar Eclipses
Partial Solar Eclipses
Partial Solar Eclipses
Partial solar eclipses are just what they sound like. The moon only partly goes in front of the sun. Partial solar eclipses comprise about 35% of all eclipses. Some of these can be impressive, but many can easily occur without anyone visually noticing. This book does not chronicle partial eclipses except occasionally as they relate to dates. Complete eclipses create a large area of partiality as well. Most online resources map this entire area. I avoid mapping partial areas as I find them distracting.
Photo courtesy NASA
The Basics: What is a Solar Eclipse and Why Should we Care?
Annular Eclipses/Ring of Fires
Annular Eclipses/Ring of Fires
Annular Eclipses/Ring of Fires
Annular (Ring of Fire) Eclipses (left) are a “complete” eclipse. The moon goes in front of the sun completely. However, the moon is slightly farther away from earth than it is for total eclipses as it makes its elliptical orbit, so the disc of the moon leaves a sunny Ring of Fire around its dark face. They comprise about 33% of solar eclipses.
Photo courtesy NASA
Hybrid Eclipses
Annular Eclipses/Ring of Fires
Annular Eclipses/Ring of Fires
Hybrid Eclipses are part “ring of fire” and part total. A path of annularity (ring of fire) will be mixed with a brief total eclipse in a very thin line. Thus, during a Hybrid, the apparent size of the moon is very closely aligned with the apparent diameter of the sun. It will be very close to a 100% match. The May 9 1948 solar eclipse (classified as a ring of fire by some) that divided North and South Korea was 99.9999% total. The Exmouth Australia Hybrid 420 eclipse of Apr 20 2023 had an incredible 100.00% coverage. The Hybrid eclipse that passed near San Francisco on April 28 1930 had a path of totality only 1/3 of a mile wide, not much more than a big city block, and totality would have lasted a few seconds. Hybrids are the rarest complete eclipse, comprising less than 5% of all solar eclipses.
Total Eclipses
Total Eclipses
Total Eclipses
Total eclipses have been called “the grandest spectacle in all of nature”. On many levels they are, aside from supernovas, the rarest possible cosmic phenomenon visible from earth. Far less humans (by orders of magnitudes)have seen a total eclipse than have seen a comet. Total eclipses require alignment between the centers of the Sun and Moon and a lucky placement of the observer. Total solar eclipses occur on average about once every 18 months somewhere on earth. But they appear very rarely at any given place on Earth, on average perhaps once every 375 to 400 years, depending on who is calculating.
Photo courtesy NASA
Annular eclipses are nearly as rare as totals but tend to have a slightly wider path of “annularity”. So it may be that any given spot on earth averages a complete eclipse of some kind every 150 years or so. Averages are rarely realities. The vast majority of people live and die without ever seeing a complete eclipse, be it total, hybrid, or ring of fire. Many people have the opportunity to witness a partial solar eclipse at some point, depending on weather.
How rare?
Total Eclipses
Total Eclipses
Are Solar Eclipses Rare?
Good question. It depends on what you define as rare. Some information sources insist that solar eclipses are common. For instance, Space.comsays this on its website:
“It's a popular misconception that solar eclipses are rare, but, in fact, they happen on average once every eighteen months”. -Space.com
Hmm. Well, there we go. But what is rarity? Is a moving thin line shadow turning day to night for a few minutes on 1/400th of a planet's surface once every 18 months rare? Depends on your perspective, I suppose. Such an event seems to me quite rare. Solar eclipses certainly don't happen a lot in any one place. Indeed, complete (especially total) solar eclipses can go a very long time without returning to any specific location.
The entire continental USA (all 48 states) went 38 years without a total eclipse in its boundaries between the eclipses of 1979 and 2017. Those two eclipses combined brought totality to much less than 10% of the USA's land mass. From the birth of the USA in 1776 to 2017, there were only 20 total solar eclipses within the boundaries of the continental USA. That means that a total solar eclipse occurred in the USA .0002% of the days. All told, less than 2 hours in nearly 250 years was spent with somewhere in totality. Seems pretty rare. But then, I'm no expert, like space.com!
Rome hasn't had a total eclipse since 1386.
Toronto has not had a Total Solar Eclipse since 1142.
Sacramento has not had one since 1084.
Jerusalem hasn't had a Total solar eclipse since 993 AD and won't have another one until the 2300's.
Computing all those endless possibilities is not really the issue. The reality is this: the earth is a rather big place, about 200 million square miles. The path of a complete eclipse is thin, usually between 50 and 150 miles wide. That path can go for maybe ten thousand miles. The path of a total eclipse can thus roughly cover an average of about 500,000 to 700,000 square miles. There is only one total eclipse on average every 18 months, and it only takes a few hours to traverse its path. It brings totality to any spot for 7 minutes or less. Any one spot has about a one in 400 chance of seeing one any year.
The Sun Appears the Same Size as the Moon in the sky
Eclipse Miracle
The Sun is the Same Size as the Moon in the Sky
The formation of intelligent life required a great deal of favorable conditions. The cosmic, molecular and biological synchronicities necessary for existence provide a continually growing body of evidence for an intelligent and active Designer. Nevertheless, such evidence is generally dismissed as coincidence by scientific orthodoxy, and likely will be until the end of the story.
While the science of Intelligent Design is generally focused on the extraordinary constructions of the things necessary for life, a much-neglected piece of evidence for Intelligent Design is to be found outside of conditions linked to necessity. Aesthetic (meaning artistic) evidence is placed directly in view of all the world, the symmetry of the two visible spheres in the sky.
Apparent Size: The sun and moon are both .5-degree angular diameter in earth's 360-degree sky. That's about the size of a pea held at arm's length. Sun and Moon often seem to appear larger than that, particularly when they rise and set, but that psychological illusion is not the subject of this work. The sun is essentially the same apparent size as the moon in the sky.
The orbits of the Moon around the Earth, and the Earth around the Sun are not perfectly circular but slightly elliptical, so the apparent angular diameters vary a bit. Still, the similarity in size remains very close. Sun and Moon average 98% similarity in size. So, on average, if you use a pea, 98% similarity would be the difference between a pea that was 12 millimeters wide and one that was 11.76 millimeters held at arm's length. The difference between the apparent size of those peas would be .24 millimeters, equal to about twice the width of a human hair perceived at a three-foot distance. If you considered basketballs held at 80-foot distances. 98 % similarity would mean one basketball was 25.6 centimeters wide and the other 25.1 centimeters 80 feet away. Obviously, there could be little perceptible difference...and perception is what this phenomenon is all about.
Such is the difference between average distances. The average, as we all know, is rarely the reality. As the moon's orbit swings between 225 and 253 thousand miles away, it can regularly line up nearly perfectly with the sun so that the percentage similarity shifts to 100%. The recent hybrid eclipse in Exmouth, Australia in 2023 featured an astounding 100.00% coverage. When the moon is closer to earth and the apparent size of the Moon appears slightly larger than the sun, from 101% up to 104%, it allows for the perfection of the total solar eclipse phenomenon.
Because the Moon's orbit seems to be moving away from earth (apparently 1.5 inches a year), astronomers tend to say that in the distant past, the moon appeared much larger than the Sun. Likewise, in the distant future, the Moon would appear smaller. This is a unique time. Apparently, intelligent life appeared upon earth while the Sun/Moon diameter is essentially identical.
Facts and figures:
Actual sizes: The Sun is 865,370 miles.
The diameter of the Moon is 2,159 miles.
There is about a 400.5 to 1 size ratio between sun and moon. That doesn't change.
Actual distances: The Sun is an “average” of 93 million miles from earth, but actual distance can vary between 91.5 million miles (147 million km) and 94.5 million miles (152 million km). Earth's orbit is also an ellipse. Over the course of the year, earth moves closest to the Sun (called perihelion), usually around January 3rd.. It reaches its farthest position from the Sun (called aphelion) around July 4th.
The Moon's orbit around the Earth is also elliptical and varies between 225,000 thousand miles (called perigee) and 252,000 miles (called apogee) over the course of 27 days. On average, the Moon is 238,000 miles away. In other words, two elliptical orbits are at work with earth, sun and moon, constantly changing the perceived angular diameters of sun and moon by very slight degrees. Generally, even the most detail-oriented astronomers just simply say the sun is 400 times bigger than moon and 400 times further away. For one instance, when the Sun is 92 million miles away and the moon is 230 thousand, the Moon is exactly 400 times closer than the Sun.
Comprehending the Actual Sizes and Distances Involved
To comprehend the scale of this cosmic reality is not easy. The vast distances involved are impossible to simulate in a published medium. You just can’t draw a picture of an object that is 400 times bigger and 400 times further away than something and then put it on a page. It must be done with words.
We'll substitute a one-foot wide (30cm) basketball for planet earth.
The Moon will then be a softball, about 4 inches (10 cm) wide. At that size ratio, the moon will be 34 feet away from Earth, a lot farther than many people realize.
Given that model ratio of the earth as a basketball and the moon as a softball 34 feet away, how big and far away is the sun? Well, the Sun would be a sphere the size of a 15-story building (133 feet in each direction) located about 2 ½ miles away from the basketball.
This gives some idea of the scale which we are dealing with.
It’s tough to comprehend this. During a total solar eclipse, sun and moon line up perfectly. They line up so perfectly that sunlight often actually ripples through valleys of the lunar surface, creating what are known as “Bailey’s Beads”. It's all quite impossible. But here we are, thinking about it! Peculiar, don't you think?
What were we taught?
Below is a quote defining solar eclipses from Kids Britannica, a popular online educational resource. It is by no means unique. Indeed, it's the common description of solar eclipses in both children's and adult educational material, and it certainly sums up the explanations I remember from my youth:
In a solar eclipse the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth. This prevents the Sun’s light from reaching Earth. As the Moon passes in front of the Sun, the Moon’s shadow sweeps across Earth. The sky gradually grows darker. --Kids Britannica. com
That’s it. While nothing about this explanation is untrue, it fails to mention a rather important fact. Namely, the sun is the same size as the moon in sky! The alignment that allows for the most incredible qualities of the phenomenon, such as the appearance of the corona, is ignored. As it turns out, generations of scientists, even eclipse specialists, find a way to downplay that truth.
Certain astonishing facts of our existence are either hidden from us by clever obfuscation or denigrated as “coincidence.” Whether it’s intentional or not is beside the point. What might this mean for the way we have viewed reality, the way we perceive our setting, history and each other?
The Moon Peculiarities
Our cosmic companion
How about the moon? Is it peculiar?
The Moon is Big relatively: Earth's moon is by far the most significant satellite around any rocky planet in the solar system. Mercury and Venus have no moons. Mars' moons are tiny odd-shaped rocks, barely 15 miles across. All great moons in the solar system outside of our moon belong to the Gas giants. But the earth’s moon is still comparable to those. The largest satellite in the solar system, Jupiter’s Ganymede, is only 1000 miles wider than our moon. Pluto and Charon at the edge of the solar system are really a dual dwarf planet system, being as they are only 12,000 miles apart. Frozen Pluto is smaller than the moon and Charon is a mere 700 miles across.
It makes the tides and more: The moon is the primary force creating our ocean tides, stirring the water and cleaning the seas. Life would likely be impossible without the moon. Also, the moon stabilizes the earth's rotation, making for a more consistent climate and acts as an asteroid shield.
I’ve Just Seen a face: The moon shows only one face to the earth, because it rotates on its axis at the exact same rate which it revolves around the earth. This phenomenon is called tidal locking.
We have bright moonlight! Who else has that?: We have the brightest moonlight known in the Cosmos. Our bright moon gives nighttime a distinct and changeable character with phases that also allow for the establishment of chronological time by creating observable months. and establishes circadian body rhythms in animals and humans. It encourages diverse nocturnal animals.
The Sun
The Sun
How about the Sun?
Perfect Sphere: The Sun is the closest thing to a perfect sphere yet observed in nature. It has less than a six mile difference in diameter between north and south axis, despite being 865,000 miles wide.
We are in the perfect place: The huge fusion furnace of the sun provides the source of all life. The Sun holds us in a favorable “Goldilocks Zone”; not too close, not too far...just right!
The sun creates proper photosynthesis for plants and proper UV light.
The Earth
The Earth
How about the Earth? Are we Peculiar?
We have life: Earth is the only known planet where life exists. Some type of life is found in virtually every place on the surface of earth.
Nice Rotation: Earth's rotational speed is just right for life. If the earth rotated on its axis slower, life would die from overexposure to either heat or cold. Faster rotation would cause environmental chaos.
Right distance from the Moon too: The earth is just the right distance from the moon. If the moon were much closer, huge tides would overflow onto the landscapes. If it were much further away, we would not have our beneficial cleansing tides.
Cool Water: The earth is the only planet known to contain large bodies of liquid water. 70% of the earth is water. Water stabilizes the earth's temperature and provides the chemical foundation for life.
Good gases too: The mixture of gases in our atmosphere is perfect for life. If this chemistry was changed even very slightly, the atmosphere would become poisonous or volatile.
Good size and nice Magnetic Field: Earth is a good-sized planet for life, with excellent gravitational conditions. The earth also has a powerful electro-magnetic shield that protects us from radiation, and an ozone layer to protect us from UV.
We’re here: There are intelligent beings on Earth capable of considering such phenomenon. Love, memory, worship, self-sacrifice, music, dance and dreams are peculiar to Earth.
An order that “educates” us to not reckon such peculiarities as the gift of a Creator is peculiar.
Is the Universe Coincidence?
Coincidence
How about the Universe? Is it Peculiar?
A wealth of information exists about the many atomic, chemical and gravitational variables finely tuned to allow for any matter at all to properly exist as we know it. Suffice it to say that even being here is practically impossible. Despite this, for nearly 200 years an institutional dogma has taught that everything popped out of nothing for no particular reason at all.
Is life Peculiar? Of course. True Peculiarity is relational.
Existence is odd. Our environment is peculiarly suited to existence. Our ability to intelligently consider this environment and existence is perhaps the strangest reality of all. When you have such a “preponderance of peculiarities”, it is reasonable to consider them as evidence of meaning, function and authorship. Odds against intelligent life's coincidental development are so great as to be incalculable. Some say billions to one, some trillions to one. No one has any clue because no one's ever been able to make life happen without previous life already existing. As absurd as these tremendous numbers and conjectures are, many maintain the possibility for coincidence.
But at some point, possibility of coincidence must become impossible. When is that Point?
Some peculiarities seem to demand assessment. When does a phenomenon cease to have the possibility for coincidence? This is not a little question. Can one always say something is coincidence? If your missing wallet turns up in my pocket, should you first turn to the law of coincidence to explain it? We were born into a world that has instituted a coincidental worldview. A kind of “law of coincidence” is tacitly enforced among educational institutions. Any talk of design is dismissed, and its advocates “canceled” and denigrated.
If we pretend life is coincidence, society will reflect that belief. Origin stories have significance. They form the basis of belief systems which lead directly to actions. We will believe something, after all.
Tyrants once at least felt obligated to offer lip service to religious faith. They now substitute a kind of evolutionary theology to justify their deeds. Networks of entrenched “experts” assume the right to give meaning and take away meaning, at their discretion. They exert power to censor pattern recognition that makes them uncomfortable.
In other words: They’ve got their story, and they’re sticking to it! I sincerely bless them and wish them well. I have tried to ignore God a few times in my life too. It’s not very fun.
If life is a coincidence, then there is no active God. If there is no active God, there is no moral responsibility. If there is no moral responsibility, there can be no organic social order. Without moral law, social order exists only as it is imposed by intimidation and brute force. Consideration of the difference between a designed and a coincidental worldview is not just philosophical exercise.
The possibility of coincidence evaporates aesthetically in the face of a total solar eclipse. Math turns into music when the sun/moon alignment is really listened to. After all the improbable fine-tuned conditions for existence are met on a single beautiful diverse planet, it so happens that the sun is the same size as the moon in the sky when you look from earth. It's clearly an aesthetic touch that reverberates with deep symbolism about perspective and story, light and darkness.
In any normal story, this great truth would be marveled at the world over, especially since we figured out scientifically just how precise this alignment is. But there is yet more evidence of authorship.
The Draco-metonic calendar
Coincidence
The Mind-Blowing Reality of the Draco-Metonic Calendar.
Let’s approach perhaps the greatest peculiarity in the shared reality we call Time. The Metonic, Draco-Metonic and the Saros Calendars.
The Metonic Calendar is 19 solar years. The Saros is 19 eclipse Years.
The Metonic Cycle is an intersection of the lunar and solar calendars described 2500 years ago by Meton of Athens. It involves the alignment of 19 Solar Years with 235 lunar months.
A Solar year is 365.2422 days. So 365.24 x 19 = 6,939.60 days
A Lunar month is 29.5302 days. So 29.53 x 235 = 6,939.68 days
This is usually rounded to 6940 days.
The difference between 19 solar years and 235 Lunar months is only about two hours. In other words, these cosmic patterns align with each other nearly perfectly every 19 solar years.
19 years ago was a lot like today. What does that mean? It means that if there is a new moon tonight, there will be a new moon 19 years from now on this same date, with two hours lag time. If there is a full moon tonight, or a crescent, or a quarter moon, or any phase, that exact same phase occurs again in 19 years. Likewise, 19 years ago on this date, there was also the same phase of the moon. After about 240 years, the date finally shifts ahead in a very long and hard to fathom cycle.
It is not a mathematical or gravitational necessity that the two primary astronomical calendars of humanity should align in such an accessible time frame as every 19 years. They could just as easily have done so for the first time after 214 years or every 2,378 years given different orbital realities.
The 19-year Metonic is a convenient synchronicity still utilized for calculating movable feasts such as Easter. This 19-year cycle was known to the Celts, who used it as their “Great Year”. It was also used by the Egyptians, Babylonians, Mayan, Chinese and other ancient societies. It is still a fundamental calendar reality for the Bahai Faith. As interesting as it is to have such an alignment, the synchronicity becomes astonishing when we consider the full Draco-Metonic Reality. But first we should learn about the “eclipse year”, the year most of us have never heard of.
The Draconic Year. The Dragon Year.
There is a type of year hardly anyone knows about except astronomers and alchemists. But it is a year, nevertheless. The Eclipse Year is vital for deepening the peculiarities presented in this book. The Eclipse Year is also called the Draconic Year. Draconic means “dragon”, as in, the dragon that eats the sun, probably in reference to Chinese folk belief. China has maintained the oldest continuous astronomical studies on earth.
The eclipse year is 346.62 days. It’s the return of the moon to the same eclipse node in the sky as the sun. An eclipse season is 173 days, where the moon is in the exact opposite node. The eclipse month, or Draconic month, is 27.212220 days, the time it takes for the moon to return to the node of the eclipse plane. The eclipse month involves a different cosmic perspective than a lunar month or a solar year. The Eclipse month is an alignment irrelevant to both solar and lunar calendars. It is difficult and possibly misleading for me to try and portray the cosmic draconic positions ( with their vast scale and movements) in a graph illustration. So I don’t try. Check online.
Trust that there is truly an ecliptic plane which sun and moon periodically cross. The moon has its “month” of crossing that ecliptic plane.
Draco Metonic Alignment:
This is where it gets amazing. Remember that 19-year spot of the Metonic where:
19 Solar Years ( 19 x 365.242 days) is 6,939.60 days….and…
235 lunar months (235 x 29.53 days) is 6,939.68 days…well…it turns out:
255 Draconic months (255 x 27.212 days) is 6,939.11 days!
Only hours over the course of almost two decades separate three completely different arrangements of time at the 19-year mark. The result: These calendars are close enough that eclipses often repeat on the same days of the year every 19 years for up to a century.
For instance: there was a solar eclipse on March 20 2015. There is another eclipse 19 years later on March 20 2034, and still another 19 years later on March 20 2053. So, of fifty complete eclipses on planet earth in those 38 years, three are on March 20. Repeating eclipses on specific calendar dates. How could that be? How weird is that?
This seems an almost impossible co-ordination. This truth is likely only known to the best astronomers ( and perhaps alchemists), and almost totally untaught in schools of the world, be they astronomical or theological. The Draco-Metonic Cycle would seem to be the maximum expression of calendar peculiarity. Calendar synchronism of this magnitude almost inevitably points to a Clockmaker, and perhaps it is this fact which has kept it from the institutions of higher learning.
It’s ok if you don’t get it all at once. I didn’t. By the end of this book, it should be second-nature.
So concludes the summary of the Draco-Metonic Calendar, which gets its own chapter later.
Again, the Draco-Metonic is the alignment of 3 Calendars at precisely 19 solar years.
The other great alignment, the Saros Cycle, is the alignment of 3 calendars at 19 eclipse years.
The Saros Cycle
Coincidence
The Saros Cycle—The Eclipse Personalities
The Saros Cycle is the last piece of this Cosmic peculiarity puzzle. Its incredible reality allows for the science of eclipse prediction. Importantly, the Saros Cycle helps define eclipses as individual personalities. These Saros personalities repeatedly grace the earth with unique geometric shadow patterns returning on a clockwork. Probably more than any other cosmic phenomenon, their cycle most resembles a lifespan. Composed of around 70 “events”, they are born and mature and die.
They also get their own section later. But I will summarize the alignment.
Remember the lunar month of 29.53 days? That provides the phases of the moon.
Remember the Draconic month of 27.21 days? That is the return of the moon to the eclipse plane.
It turns out they align almost perfectly at 19 eclipse ( Draconic) which is 18 years, 11 days and 8 hours. As it happens, 19 eclipse years is 19 solar years minus one lunar year. Boy, that’s something.
See if you can keep this straight. It took me a while to take in, but it’s not because the numbers are nonsense. It’s because the synchronistic truth they convey is difficult to believe.
See, there's also an “anomalistic” month, based on the closeness of the moon to the earth. The lunar orbit is elliptical. The time it takes for it to return from closest-to-closest point, called perigee, or from farthest-to-farthest point, called apogee, is the anomalistic month. It is 27.5545 days. It turns out that 239 anomalistic months is also 19 eclipse years.
What is the Saros alignment:
A Saros Cycle is a period of exactly:
242 draconic months: 6585 days (6584.82)
223 lunar months: 6585 days (6585.19)
239 anomalistic months 6585 days (6585.45)
This alignment is how we can predict future eclipses and determine the paths of past eclipses.
One Saros period after an eclipse, the Sun, Earth and Moon return to about the same relative geometry, a near straight line, and a very similar eclipse will occur but at a different place on earth, landing about 1/3 of the way around the earth since the last time this geometry occurred.
A Saros Cycle is exactly 19 eclipse years (or 18.999%).
Recap of peculiarities
No Coincidence
The Recap—here's our years:
Solar Year: 365.24 days
Lunar Year: 354.36 days
Eclipse Year: 346.62 days
Here’s our months:
Lunar (synodic) Month: 29.53 days
Draconic (eclipse) Month: 27.21 days
Anomalistic (moon distance) Month: 27.55 days
Here’s 19 Year Metonic Alignment (same phase of moon every 19 years)
19 solar years: 6939.60 days
235 lunar months: 6939.68 days
Here’s 19 Year Draco-Metonic Alignment (same phase of moon and repeating eclipse)
19 solar years: 6939.60 days
235 lunar months: 6939.68 days
255 Draconic months 6939.11 days
Here’s Saros Alignment (repeating eclipse personality -19 eclipse years):
242 draconic months: 6585 days (6584.82)
223 lunar months: 6585 days (6585.19)
239 anomalistic months 6585 days (6585.45)
Summary of peculiarities outlined so far:
• It's peculiar that you are reading this, and exist at all, endowed with acute observational abilities. It's peculiar that I care about this phenomenon, or your ability to understand it.
• It is peculiar that life exists on earth, made possible only through an extraordinary combination of peculiar circumstances, including balanced astronomical and chemical conditions.
• It is peculiar that we have a large Moon directly facilitating the existence of life on earth, which provides significant light at night, and conceptions of the passage and division of time.
• It is peculiar that our life-giving light source, the Sun, is perfectly situated in relation to our moon to create perfect eclipses, the sun being 400 times bigger and 400 times further away. Our two great cosmic partners in this journey are the same apparent size. The sun's light is peculiar as well, creating a pinpoint of shadow known as an umbra during a total eclipse.
• It is peculiar that this arrangement is distinguished by certain repeatable variables that make the phenomenon of complete eclipses rare but also regular. The tilt of the Earth at 5 degrees, the variation in the physical distance from the Earth to Moon during the Moon's orbit, and the orbital distinctions all allow for the phenomenon of eclipses to not occur every month in the same places, but instead appear fairly infrequently and at varied geographic locations. Complete eclipses occur on average about once every nine months, but the earth can go as long as nearly 2 years without a complete solar eclipse appearing anywhere. Most human beings go their entire life without ever viewing a complete solar eclipse. It is peculiar that we have a Saros Cycle every 19 Eclipse years. The alignment of three cosmic phenomenon—the Lunar (synodic) Month, the Draconic (eclipse) Year, and the Anomalistic (perigee to perigee) Month- allow for the creation of unique eclipse personalities. This regularity creates the ability to both predict future eclipses and map out past eclipses following mathematical formulas, thus creating the template for what I term God Song hieroglyphs.
• It is peculiar that we have a Metonic Calendar. That is, that the two different primary realities of human calendar time—solar year and lunar month-- should align at a convenient time, 19 solar years and 235 lunar months.
• It is peculiar that we have a Draco-Metonic Calendar reality, where the eclipse year also aligns with that same 19 year solar Metonic. 19 solar years equals 235 lunar months equals 255 Draconic months. This alignment allows for eclipses to often repeat on the same day of the year every 19 years, sometimes over the course of a century.
• It is peculiar how much of this reality remains unconsidered and untaught. Children are not even taught that the sun is the same size as the moon in the sky.
There you have it. Just preliminary peculiarities. Each one of these is worthy of a book by a better author than me. But I’m doing it anyway.