Show HN: Lookup your next total solar eclipse
2 by krschacht | 0 comments on Hacker News.
This is a fun little project that helps you figure out the next total solar eclipse. They’re quite rare so don’t miss it! I live somewhere that is in the path of the April 4th total solar eclipse. Some friends were wondering, “If I don’t travel to go see this total eclipse, I can experience another one soon, right?” This started a friend and me trying to figure out when the next one will be for us or for any specific person. It turns out, the predictions are quite complicated. Even though all the bodies involved have very regular orbits, the moon and earth don’t orbit in perfect circles, the plane of the orbit wobbles. The earth wobbles on its axis. Basically, you have to model a bunch of moving parts and predict when they’ll all line up again. The upcoming solar eclipse is called Solar Saros 139 and it’s easy to predict when this particular cycle will return again, but it’s hard to predict where exactly the shadow will fall. I quickly realized that working through all this math was more than I was interested in tackling, but I found a geocities-aged NASA website that pre-calculated a bunch of this so I could simply map a latitude and longitude: https://ift.tt/4OmWvwn Using the core algorithm for this project, I added the location finder and made it much easier to grok. Enjoy!
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