Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Ephemeris for Thursday, May 3rd.  The sun rises at 6:29.  It’ll be up for 14 hours and 21 minutes, setting at 8:50.   The moon, 2 days before full, will set at 5:11 tomorrow morning.

Eclipses of the sun and moon were most terrifying events for the ancient and primitive peoples.  The Chinese thought a dragon was devouring the sun would bang on gongs and shoot arrows into the air to drive the dragon away.  It worked every time.  Predicting these eclipses became an important matter for ancient astronomers.  It was the Chaldeans several centuries before the common era that apparently discovered the interval at which like eclipses occur.  The period of 18 year 11 and a third days is called the saros cycle.  There are many saros cycles running at any one time.  A saros series contains 71 or 72 eclipses, crossing the earth slowly from north to south or south to north.  We’ll talk more about eclipses later this month.

Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.  They may be different for your location.

Addendum

For more information check out Saros in Wikipedia

Saros 136 animation, Public Domain (official work for NASA by Fred Espenak)

Above is an animation of eclipse paths running south to north for saros 136.