written by Mario Belloni and Todd Timberlake

The Solar and Lunar Eclipse model simulates the occurrences of solar and lunar eclipses. Moon's orbital inclination of 5.145 degrees with respect to the ecliptic (the Earth-Sun orbital plane) is what is responsible for solar and lunar eclipses not occurring every month. This inclination and the motion of Moon and Earth are depicted (the size of Sun, Earth, and Moon and the size of Moon's orbit are not shown to scale). The illuminated sides of Earth and Moon and the regions of possible eclipses (in yellow and green) are also depicted. In the Ecliptic View, the motion of Sun and Moon across the sky (+/- 7 degrees from the ecliptic) are shown. Moon's phase is shown and solar and lunar eclipses can occur on the ecliptic when Earth, Sun, and Moon line up properly.  

The Solar and Lunar Eclipse model is distributed as a ready-to-run (compiled) Java archive.  Double clicking the ejs_astronomy_SolarLunarEclipse.jar file will run the program if Java is installed.  You can modify this simulation if you have EJS installed by right-clicking within the plot and selecting "Open EJS Model" from the pop-up menu item.

• Download ejs_astronomy_SolarLunarEclipse.jar - 2250kb Java Archive File

Published November 13, 2009
Last Modified June 12, 2014

This file has previous versions.

Source Code for the Solar and Lunar Eclipse Model  program.

• Download ejs_astronomy_SolarLunarEclipse.zip - 296kb Compressed File

Released under a This material is released under the GNU General Public License Version 3.

Published November 13, 2009
Last Modified June 12, 2014

This file has previous versions.