(27-07-2026, 07:45 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Predictions based on periodicity are necessarily wrong in the long term, because the astronomical periods are not commensurate. Thus it would not be useful to make them for more than a few decades into the future. No?
I don't know. If the goal was to observe/witness future eclipses, precision was not very important , if one could compute the solar eclipse with +/- two weeks it's already fine, because the actual eclipse will be on the new moon day of the corresponding lunar month, impossible to miss and easy to compute a few months in advance.
If these were the predictions, I still have no idea what method was used. And how were they able to only (mostly?) predict eclipses which would be visible from Europe. I'm not even sure what method they would use to observe partial eclipses, was camera obscura known in Europe at the time? If they knew that lunar and solar eclipses are offset by almost exactly 9 years, they could use the records of total lunar eclipses, which are much easier to observe, to predict solar eclipses.
So, to sum it up, I have no idea.