Solar Eclipse Prime Page
Annular Solar Eclipse of -0372 Dec 17 (0373 Dec 17 BCE)
Fred Espenak
Introduction
The Annular Solar Eclipse of -0372 Dec 17 (0373 Dec 17 BCE) is visible from the geographic regions shown on the map to the right. Click on the map to enlarge it. For an explanation of the features appearing in the map, see Key to Solar Eclipse Maps.
The instant of greatest eclipse takes place on -0372 Dec 17 at 16:54:47 TD (12:44:42 UT1). This is 0.1 days after the Moon reaches apogee. During the eclipse, the Sun is in the constellation Sagittarius. The synodic month in which the eclipse takes place has a Brown Lunation Number of -28373.
The eclipse belongs to Saros 55 and is number 50 of 73 eclipses in the series. All eclipses in this series occur at the Moons ascending node. The Moon moves southward with respect to the node with each succeeding eclipse in the series and gamma decreases.
The solar eclipse of -0372 Dec 17 is an exceptionally long annular eclipse with a duration at greatest eclipse of 10m02s. It has an eclipse magnitude of 0.9169.
The annular solar eclipse of -0372 Dec 17 is preceded two weeks earlier by a penumbral lunar eclipse on -0372 Dec 02, and it is followed two weeks later by a penumbral lunar eclipse on -0371 Jan 01.
These eclipses all take place during a single eclipse season.
The eclipse predictions are given in both Terrestrial Dynamical Time (TD) and Universal Time (UT1). The parameter ΔT is used to convert between these two times (i.e., UT1 = TD - ΔT). ΔT has a value of 15004.7 seconds for this eclipse. The uncertainty in ΔT is 384.0 seconds corresponding to a standard error in longitude of the eclipse path of ± 1.60°.
The following links provide maps and data for the eclipse.
- Orthographic Map: Annular Solar Eclipse of -0372 Dec 17 - global map of eclipse visibility
- Google Map: Annular Solar Eclipse of -0372 Dec 17 - interactive map of the eclipse path
- Path Table: Annular Solar Eclipse of -0372 Dec 17 - coordinates of the central line and path limits
- Circumstances Table: Annular Solar Eclipse of -0372 Dec 17 - eclipse times for hundreds of cities
- Saros 55 Table - data for all eclipses in the Saros series
The tables below contain detailed predictions and additional information on the Annular Solar Eclipse of -0372 Dec 17 .