Solar Eclipse

[xigarena]

What conditions must exist for a solar eclipse to occur? The only condition is that the phase of the Moon must be new. The phase of the Moon must be new and the Moon must be passing through Earth’s orbital plane.
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market samurai ~ marketsamurai

[rufessor]

I believe that is probably true, but what I am unsure of is how to actually calculate that using an arduino processor and what exactly you would be looking for in terms of the effect on the tank lighting? SHould it just go dark? If your looking for exact correlation with an eclipse out your window... the MoonPhase calculation we use is very flimsy in terms of the exact time of the moon phase (Roberto can confirm) I did not write that... but it looks like the same one I was going to write in and if this is the case... timing is very poor (like +/- 2 hours) because the math is greatly simplified- so it may not overlap appropriately to get the effect at the exact time. My biggest concern is how complex the equations are that would need to be implemented to get this to work. Arduino is memory limited and totally bogs down if you feed it too much floating point math. I have no idea what the calculations look like but my guess is that they are perhaps non trivial as it would involve tracking the sun and earth position as well as the moon. Moon is done (with provisions as noted)... the earth and sun I really don't know about. It may be really simple... it may not.