Thirty Millennium Catalog of Solar and Lunar Eclipses (C) 2014-2017 John Irwin

Thirty Millennium Catalog of Solar and Lunar Eclipses (3rd Ed)

Follow the links provided below to obtain copies of my 30MKSE and 30MKLE. These data tables were derived from JPL's DE441 long-term planetary ephemerides spanning the years from -13000 to +17000. This is more than a full precessional period of the Earth's axis.

To calculate this precessional motion more accurately than current IAU models the long-term model of Vondrak, Capitaine, and Wallace is used (Astronomy & Astrophysics, vol. 534, A22, 2011 and vol. 541, C1, 2012 for errata). It covers about 400 millennia and was constructed to be as accurate as the recent IAU-2006 precession model over current epochs. The nutational motion of the Earth's axis is also included and for this a version of the IAU-2000B model compatible with IAU-2006 precession is used. While this nutation model is more than accurate enough for current epochs, it cannot be relied upon for the full span of the catalog. However, as nutation models are essentially periodic in nature, it will not "blow-up" when used far from J2000.0 and can be expected to introduce errors of no more than about 10 arcseconds in the orientation of the Earth's pole.

Standard radii for the Earth (WGS84) and Moon are used in this catalog. Note in particular that a single lunar radius is used for the solar eclipse data so that corrections for the lunar limb profile can be made simply and consistently. This is a lunar centre-of-mass catalog.

For the third edition of the catalog the following computational changes have been made: (a) the planetary ephemeris has been updated to the recently-released DE441 from JPL (previously DE431); (b) apparent place calculations are now fully relativistic, rather than being somewhat newtonian previously; (c) the solar radius has been increased to 960" (at one au) to be consistent with recent measurements that indicate a radius significantly larger than the standard value of 959.63" is needed to adequately reproduce visual observations. These changes have resulted in there being 18 fewer solar eclipses than found in the 2nd edition of the catalog, and 33 fewer lunar eclipses, mostly due to the change in solar radius.

The catalog table data are provided in the form of simple ASCII text files:

Solar eclipses – edited version	Lunar eclipses – edited version
Solar eclipses – full catalog (zip)	Lunar eclipses – full catalog (zip)

Take a look at the edited versions first to see if they're suitable for you (if you think a different format would be useful, let me know and I'll see what I can do). The full data set is contained in the corresponding ZIP file. I have created the data suitable for further processing, which explains in part the extended precision of many tabulated quantities. The data section in each catalog has one eclipse per line so make sure you can handle long lines. This is particularly true for the solar eclipses which include bessel elements.

Also note that the catalogs are strictly TT-based. You will need to supply your own ΔT model to convert event results to universal quantities (time and longitude). The model by Fred Espenak is recommended. For eclipses in the recent past and the near future (what I call the UTC-era) accurate conversion to UTC and true longitude is possible without a ΔT model but you still need current values for UT1-UTC and UTC-TAI to do that calculation successfully.

Please note that this catalog is free for personal use only. Commercial use requires explicit permission and special arrangements. Source acknowledgement would be appreciated if you use the catalogs. Any problems or questions, please contact me (johnATjir1667-plus-com).

First edition released 6 January 2014. Second edition released 1 February 2017. This edition released 29 January 2021