Raw research

updated 2026-09-15

Working notes, one topic per folder. Each note ends with what this changes for the pipeline design, saying so explicitly when the answer is nothing, and then the questions it could not close, naming the paper, dataset or line of code to obtain rather than the subject to think about further.

Synthesis lives in reports. These pages are allowed to contradict each other until it does.

In this section

FoundationsBesselian elements, the fundamental plane, and how the elements are derived from an ephemeris of the Sun and Moon.2 pages Catalogues and typesHow every solar eclipse in a period is found, how each one is typed as partial, annular, total or hybrid, and which canons and data products carry the results.3 pages Global circumstancesHow the central line, the umbral and penumbral limits, the shadow outlines, the rise and set curves, the magnitude contours and the path products on a world map are computed from Besselian elements.3 pages Local circumstancesFrom Besselian elements or a topocentric ephemeris to one observer's contact times, magnitude, obscuration, position angles, altitude, duration, the corrections that move those numbers by seconds, and the public code that computes them.3 pages Lunar limb profileHow the Moon's mountains and valleys enter an eclipse computation, from Watts' 1963 charts to LOLA and Kaguya DEMs, and what they change in contact times, path limits and Baily's beads.3 pages Solar radiusWhich solar radius an eclipse computation should use, where each value in circulation comes from, and what a 0.1 arcsecond change does to path limits, durations and contact times.2 pages Earth model and time scalesThe figure of the Earth, observer height and terrain, ΔT and Earth rotation, refraction, light-time and time scales, with the size of every effect and which predictors include it.3 pages Lunar and solar modelThe ephemerides that place the Moon and Sun, the physical model of the Moon (centre of mass versus figure, the radius ratio k, the PA and ME frames, libration) and what each choice costs in arcseconds, seconds and kilometres.2 pages Software and repositoriesSurvey of the programs, web services, libraries, public repositories and datasets that compute solar eclipse products, with their inputs, constants, licences and documented validation.4 pages Validation and error budgetHow eclipse predictions have been checked against timed observations, how far the major predictors disagree at the path edge, and what each term contributes to the error of a modern prediction.3 pages NASA SVS and Ernie WrightThe raster-oriented, terrain-aware eclipse maps of NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio, the 2024 Astronomical Journal paper that documents them, the datasets they released, and how they differ from Espenak, Jubier and Irwin.3 pages