Technical Notes 

    Fred Espenak is a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He is the author of the book,  Fifty 

Years of Canon of Lunar Eclipses 1986 2035 (Sky Publishing Corp.), and co author of the book, Totality : Eclipses of 

the Sun, (Oxford University Press). No endorsement of the premises or conclusions of this book by Fred 

Espenak or by NASA is implied, nor should be inferred.  

    The dates and times for eclipses and lunar phases given by Fred Espenak on the NASA/GSFC web site 

correlate well with the data given by the RedShift 3 software. The correlation between the data from RedShift 3 

and from the NASA/GSFC web site on eclipses and phases of the moon is not exact, but differs for the times 

of eclipses and new moons by about 9 to 12 minutes. This small difference is not enough to affect the date of 

an eclipse or the date for the start of a month in the Jewish lunar calendar. 

    The fact that a difference occurs at all indicates that a somewhat different calculation method was used by 

these two sources of data. If the same method is used by two different sources to arrive at the exact same 

conclusion, this is not like two witness, but one, since the method is one and the same. But when two different 

methods are used to arrive at nearly the same conclusion, this provides further support for the conclusion, 

since two different approaches gave essentially the same result. 

    The difference between the  RedShift 3 data and the NASA/GSFC web site data, a difference of 9 to 12 

minutes or so, does not affect the calculation as to whether or not an eclipse was visible. The difference of 12 

minutes or so is only a matter of what time one gives to a particular event. For example, the NASA/GSFC 

web site has a solar eclipse on June 30 of 

A.D.

 10 at 11:19 hours Universal Time (U.T.). RedShift 3 has a solar 

eclipse on June 30 of 

A.D.

 10 at 11:08 U.T. 

    The difference in calculations is not a difference in the relative positions of the sun, moon, and earth on any 

one day. If it were, then 11 minutes would be the difference between whether an eclipse occurred or not. 

Rather, both sources have the sun, moon, and earth in the same positions relative to one another. The 

difference is basically the amount of time which has lapsed since the moon, sun, and earth were in such a 

position relative to one another. This is clearly seen when one compares the data on solar eclipses from the 

two sources. They both agree in every case as to whether or not there was an eclipse and as to what kind of 

eclipse it was (total or partial). If there was a difference in the positions of the sun, moon, and earth relative to 

one another, then one set of data would be saying that there was a total eclipse, and the other set of data would 

be saying that there was no eclipse at all, or that it was only a partial eclipse. Since that is not the case, the fact 

that two different sets of calculations arrived at very much the same conclusions is reassuring and constitutes 

the evidence of two witnesses who agree. 

    The evidence of two or three witnesses is needed to decide a case (Mt 18:16; Deut 17:6; 2 Cor 13:1). Since 

the data from both the NASA/GSFC web site and RedShift 3 software are in close agreement, we can have 

confidence is this data and use it to assist in determining the dates of events in the first century 

B.C.

 and first 

century 

A.D.

Solar Eclipses and Augustus Caesar's Death 

    From 

A.D.

 10 to 

A.D.

 14, inclusive, there is only one solar eclipse that fits the description given by Dio for 

the eclipse prior to Augustus Caesar's death the eclipse of June 30, 

A.D.

 10. Below is a list of eclipse dates 

and times, taken from the  Five  Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses on the NASA/GSFC web site.

1230

 Beside 

each eclipse is noted the area of the earth's surface which was covered by the shadow of the moon during the 

solar eclipse, according to RedShift 3 software.

1231

        Date  

U.T. 

Mag. 

Lat./Long.   

Visible from 

 0010   Jan 04 

05:13    0.914  75.5S   103.0E   

Antarctica 

 0010   Jun 30 

11:19     1.060   82.9N   13.5W   

Europe 

 0010   Nov 24 

13:49     0.119   63.3N   12.3E 

Northern Europe 

 0010   Dec 24 

05:48     0.218   65.8S   73.5W   

Antarctica 

 0011   May 21  15:05     0.980   56.3S   12.8W   

South America, South Africa 

 0011   Nov 14 

00:48     1.020   27.2N   177.2W   

Pacific Ocean 

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