Easy to Implement Lunar Eclipse Dates Incrementor Leveraging NASA Tabulated Data

[Alexander Wolf]

Original by Anonymous from: https://sourceforge.net/p/stellarium/discussion/278769/thread/7941f2c0/

Hello, I would like to suggest the following easy to implement "Plug-in" to 0.14 or a future version of Stellarium
"Quickly Increment to Next or Previous Maximum Lunar Eclipse Time Leveraging NASA Data"

There has been public domain interest has been generated surroundingn the 4 lunar eclipses covering 2014 and 2015. This tool could be a good "hook" for more users to start using (and debugging) the software.

One Vision:

Moon needs to be automatically triggered to "travel with" play|manual increment mode (locked until plug-in is closed) mode as nearby time and/or dates of each eclipse are eith incremented to or jumped to.

Add a "Next Lunar Eclipse, Previous Lunar Eclipse" buttons with 3 check boxes. The three checkboxes are for Total, Pernumbral, and Partial Lunar Eclipses between astro year -1999 and astro year 3000 to cycle through NASA's 5,000 year catalog of Lunar Eclipses [12,604 total lunar eclipses] starting from the current time toolbar's time always going forward.
This data is already tabulated and would mostly involve a few days of effort to cut and paste each webpage's data for the specific number of years.

The data is listed in web format here:
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/LEcat5/LEcatalog.htm

Future efforts could would also add in known historical solar eclipses already cataloged at NASA.
The stellarium debugging effort would benefit from this "plug in" when used as a version check tool.

[gzotti (georg-zotti)]

Sure. There is also good instruction how to make such a thing in Meeus' Astronomical Algorithms.
One of the many things to add, time permitting...