eclipsemap

An interactive orrery of every kind of eclipse the solar system actually has — not just Earth's. Real orbital elements, real Keplerian mechanics, real shadow geometry: Jupiter's moons eclipsing its sun almost daily, Phobos too small to ever fully block Mars's, Pluto & Charon's once-a-century mutual-eclipse seasons. Pick a body, scrub time, watch it happen.

total annular partial transit penumbral
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Pick a planet on the map to see its eclipses.
about the model — what's real data, what's simplified

Real: every body's semi-major axis, eccentricity, orbital inclination, orbital period, physical radius, and axial tilt come from NASA/JPL planetary and satellite fact sheets. The eclipse math — angular sizes, umbra/penumbra shadow cones, total vs. annular vs. partial classification — is the same geometry real eclipse prediction uses, just without the higher-order perturbation corrections professional ephemerides add.

Simplified: this is a two-body Keplerian propagator (each body orbits its parent on a fixed ellipse), not a live n-body ephemeris. Each moon's starting orbital phase is an arbitrary-but-fixed value, not looked up from a real "where is Io right now" feed — so exact predicted dates drift from reality within roughly an orbit or so, even though the mechanism, frequency, and character of each eclipse type is physically real. A few high-inclination moons (Triton, Charon, the Uranian moons) use an approximated "effective inclination" derived from their parent planet's real axial tilt rather than a precisely-oriented equatorial plane, so eclipse-season timing is illustrative even though the underlying "seasons happen at all, decades apart" behavior is real.

a few real facts the simulator doesn't need to compute to be true

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