Eclipse first, and the rest nowhere

[syncategorematic]

There was a major cloud over Kincardine at totality, so I did not see it out my window. But I did see the crescent of the penumbra, and the tiny sliver that ended up happening.

When I was about nine years old, and there was an annular solar eclipse over Ottawa and my mother took me out of school to see it through smoked glass, I had seen the crescent too, not the total state. It looked a lot like the moon, through our homemade smoked glass (obviously, this has done no lasting damage to my eyesight; even my right-eye myopia was occurring even before then.)

Question for science fiction fans: is there an app somewhere online for which you can input a multiple-moon system's orbital periods, the period of the planet in question (since, according to Kepler's law, it is a function of the distance) and get a schedule of when there will be two moons in the sky, when three, when one will be in eclipse while another will not, etc.? It's a system of quadratic and cubic equations, so technically, you can lay it out by hand and solve with a calculator, but it just seems the kind of number-crunching a computer might do. For a reasonable number of moons.

Comments

[rootedinsong.livejournal.com]

I don't know if such a thing exists, but... you said you wanted to learn to program, right? :)