Details
The exeligmos was known by the Greeks as early as 100 BC. A clock they made, called the Antikythera mechanism was able to predict the dates of consecutive exeligmoses.
The exeligmos is 669 synodic months (every eclipse cycle must be an integer number of synodic months), 726 draconic months (which ensures the sun and moon are in alignment during the new moon), and almost exactly 717 anomalistic months (ensuring the moon is at the same point of its elliptic orbit). The first two factors make this a long lasting eclipse series. The latter factor is what makes each eclipse in an exeligmos so similar. The near integer number of anomalistic months ensures that the apparent diameter of the moon will be nearly the same with each successive eclipse. The fact that it is almost exactly 19,756 days ( a whole integer) ensures each successive eclipse in the series occurs very close to the previous eclipse in the series. Because it is over a month longer than a calendar year, the path of each eclipse one exeligmos apart is roughly 600 miles away from the previous one. The sun's apparent diameter also changes significantly in one month, affecting the length and width of a solar eclipse.
Read more about this topic: Exeligmos
Famous quotes containing the word details:
“If my sons are to become the kind of men our daughters would be pleased to live among, attention to domestic details is critical. The hostilities that arise over housework...are crushing the daughters of my generation....Change takes time, but men’s continued obliviousness to home responsibilities is causing women everywhere to expire of trivialities.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Working women today are trying to achieve in the work world what men have achieved all along—but men have always had the help of a woman at home who took care of all the other details of living! Today the working woman is also that woman at home, and without support services in the workplace and a respect for the work women do within and outside the home, the attempt to do both is taking its toll—on women, on men, and on our children.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)
“Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. One must seem to hear the unreasonable demands of the petulant, unmoved, and the tedious details of the dull, untired. That is the least price that a man must pay for a high station.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)