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An empire lost, an empire saved, lives lost, lives saved. Read about some unexpected outcomes of solar and lunar eclipses.

Four Historic Eclipses

Columbus was desperate after he was shipwrecked on Jamaica. The local people had stopped helping him after someappalling behavior by his crew.

Predicting eclipses was a tricky business and it needed to be based on good ephemera (positional information of heavenly bodies). Columbus - and other navigators - had the ephemera of Regiomontanus. These were the best available, but he must have realized that it was all still a bit shaky. The eclipse he was counting on was near the end of the years for which Regiomontanus had calculated eclipses. The man himself had been dead for over a quarter of a century.

But I guess when there's nothing left to lose . . .

19th century illustration of Columbus and the lunar eclipse that saved his life.

A historic eclipse I didn't include was Einstein's Eclipse since I'd written about it in another article. Arthur Eddington was testing a prediction made by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity about how a massive body would bend light. The results not only rocked science, but made news headlines too.

An eclipse that occurred almost exactly 164 years ago is historic because the first photograph of a solar eclipse was taken on that occasion - July 28, 1851. It was a daguerreotype taken at the Royal Observatory in Königsberg, Prussia. The photographer was named Berkowski, but there is no record of what his first name was.

You can find out more here about "Photography and the Birth of Astrophysics".