Talk:List of 16th-century lunar eclipses

Latest comment: 10 years ago by Tomruen in topic UT

UT edit

Okay...can somebody who actually knows how to read this chart actually give some guidance on *how*?

For instance when they say "UT", what the heck does that mean?

The chart is presented without any context other than "this is a list of eclipses"; you have the dates, which is excellent, and whether they were total or partial, etc, but...not the times in a clear enough manner that anybody without actual astronomical knowledge could read it. I don't know what the unit "UT" means. Utah? Universal Time? It's not GMT, is all I know, which means it's not something I can easily convert to a comprehensible time. And there isn't a note ANYWHERE on this page that clarifies what the different units on the chart refer to, other than whether Julian or Gregorian calander is being used.

This is important, because the main reason somebody would be looking this stuff up, I'm sure, is to figure out when certain parts of the historical world would have seen an eclipse; if you can't identify the time easily, then it makes it hard to figure out if say, the eclipse was visible to Japan, or the Americas. Which is what I originally came here to find out. :\ 71.47.209.145 (talk) 03:48, 17 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

It could use some work, UT is UTC or Coordinated Universal Time. And yes, its hard to figure out where its visible by the table alone, that is you need to compute if the moon is above the horizon at the given contact times for a given location. The source table from NASA isn't any better in that regard, but does give more details.[1]. Each event has a graphic, like [2] which shows the geographic visibility. Tom Ruen (talk) 04:15, 17 April 2014 (UTC)Reply