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By Jean Meeus
Successive years of total solar eclipses gradually coat the planet, giving every place on Earth
a spot under the Moons shadow. Illustration by Kip Henrie.
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computers in astronomy
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Most of the globe is painted by eclipse paths after only a few centuries, as seen in this series of maps (left to right) showing 100, 200, and 300
years of total-eclipse paths over North America. It takes millenniums to pick up the straggling areas. The author determined that 63 percent of
the Northern Hemisphere is covered after 300 years, and 92 percent is covered after 800 years. Diagrams by Jean Meeus.
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Southern Hemisphere were finally covered by including 1400 to 800 B.C. Thus
each of the 64,440 points was covered by
at least one total solar eclipse between
1400 B.C. and A.D. 2800.
Of course, this grid of 64,440 points
distributed over the globe does not represent all places on Earths surface. Because
the points along each parallel of latitude
were separated by 1 in longitude, they
were much closer to each other at high
latitudes than near the equator. Indeed, at
the equator 1 of longitude corresponds
to 111 kilometers; this distance is reduced
to only 2 km at 89 latitude. Consequently, some remaining places were up to 79
km from the grid points considered.
I repeated the whole calculation for
other points, so that the separation in
both longitude and latitude was now 12.
After again considering the period from
1400 B.C. to A.D. 2800, there remained
two empty points: neighboring spots in
the southern Pacific Ocean at latitude
62 30 south, and west longitudes 160
30 and 161. These two stubborn places
were finally covered by extending the calculation to A.D. 3158.
In the end, all 258,482 points I considered on the globe (including the two
poles) were covered at least once by total
solar eclipse tracks during 46 centuries
a far cry from the 50,000 to 500,000
years guessed by one of the readers of
Schillings message. Another reader even
thought that it would take millions of
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