Eclipse Atlas — 5000 years of solar eclipses

Loading five millennia of eclipses…

View Projection

3D view Camera

Shadow cones Track on globe Sun at true distance

Distances are real. The Moon is ~60 Earth radii away and its umbral cone runs out at ~58.8 — so the tip only just reaches the ground, which is why totality is a track barely 100 km wide.

Render quality Jump to year Recentre on each eclipse

Layers

Historical records

Eclipse paths in view Draw all central lines

ΔT (Earth's rotation)

offset 0.0σ

Before telescopes, how fast Earth was spinning is only known to within minutes. That uncertainty slides the whole path east–west — it is the dominant error for ancient eclipses, far larger than any error in the Moon's position.