The hybrid solar eclipse in Exmouth a couple of weeks ago was a pretty rare event, but to the surprise of no-one it was predicted with more-or-less perfect accuracy (cause, science). But it wasn’t always that way – actually, it was only a few hundred years ago that Halley (the comet guy) made the first accurate prediction of the time and location of a solar eclipse. That was the eclipse of May 3, 1715, which is around the same time that Buffon (one ‘o’) proposed that the Earth was 100,000 years old (he was out by about 4.6 billion years), and Prévost figured out that cold was the absence of heat (genius). Truly the age of science.

The history of predicting eclipses goes back a long way, ironically much further than our knowledge that eclipses are caused by the moon moving between the earth and the sun. The Chinese thought at one point that an eclipse was caused when the celestial dragon ate the sun (presumably regurgitating it again minutes later), and most cultures thought it was a bad omen from the gods (were there any good omens back in those days?). But the Babylonians and Mesopotamians figured out how to predict when they would occur – they just extrapolated from what had happened in the past. So leading up to an expected eclipse, they would install a substitute king to ensure the gods’ wrath was not directed at the true king, and then for his trouble the fake king was executed after the eclipse was over.

For all their knowledge of astronomy and mathematics the Greeks were fairly useless at predicting eclipses. Thales of Miletus might have just got lucky in the 6th century BC when he guessed the correct year of an eclipse during the battle of Halys. Both sides were so freaked out when it actually happened that they agreed to peace terms on the spot. But they did have the Antikythera mechanism from the 2nd century BC, which, like the pyramids, was far too advanced for humankind to have conceived of and so must have been built by aliens. It could be used to predict eclipses based on models of the solar system and was so complex that we still haven’t been able to build a working replica today.

Now you might wonder where flat earther’s stand on all this considering that predicting eclipses is based on laws that assume the earth is spherical. Actually, they argue that eclipses prove that the Earth is flat. For one thing, if the earth were round and rotated west to east, the shadow of the moon during an eclipse would move from east to west. Which it doesn’t – hence flat Earth. Uh huh. Except the moon moves as well, faster than the earth rotates, which is why its shadow moves towards the east during an eclipse. There’s an equally ridiculous argument about the size of the moon’s shadow being too small, but I won’t even bother with that one.

Now we have until July 22, 2028, to wait for another eclipse in Australia, and that one will be right over Sydney. If you miss that, the law of averages says you’ll need to wait another 360 years until another occurs in the same place, but Brisbane at least has one scheduled for 2037. Assuming the gods don’t change their minds.

TL;DR – eclipses are deadly (antiquity), mysterious (middle-ages), fun (modernity)