Eclipses of the Moon in India

Abstract

THIS work is in fact a continuation and completion of Mr. Sewell's “Indian Calendar,” which was noticed in NATURE for July 9, 1896 (vol. liv. p. 219). The principal matter (besides some notes and additions to the Calendar), is a table of the times, durations, and magnitudes of all eclipses of the moon (whether visible or not in India) for the period of sixteen hundred years, from A.D. 300 to A.D. 1900. The times are reduced to the Hindu prime meridian, that of Lairka (Ujjain), the longitude of which is 75° 46′ east of Greenwich, and are reckoned from mean sunrise (taken as 6h. a.m.) at that place. The calculations are founded on Oppolzer's “Canon der Finster-nisse”; but another table gives the figures reduced from the Nautical Almanac from its commencement in 1767 (or rather 1768, as no eclipse of the moon occurred in the former year), though the figures in the “Canon” are probably more accurate than those in the Almanac before the year 1819 (not 1821), when Burckhardt's lunar tables were first brought into use in the latter. Mr. Sewell has not thought it necessary to mark the magnitude of an eclipse as greater than total, simply affixing to all such the letter “t.” He acknowledges the help in the calculations afforded by Saukara Balkrishna Dikshit, formerly Pandit of the Training College, Poona, whose co-operation was so valuable in his work on the “Indian Calendar,” and whose death took place early in the present year; and also expresses his thanks for kind advice and assistance given by Prof. Turner (of Oxford) and Mr. Crommelin (of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich). The precautions taken have probably secured that accuracy which is so particularly essential in matters of this kind; here we will merely point out two errors in p. 4 of the Introduction, where “fixtures” is printed instead of “figures,” and Burckhardt's name is spelt without a “k,” though Mr. Sewell is liberal of that letter in retaining the obsolete method of spelling “Almanac” with one. Eclipses of the Moon in India. By Robert Sewell, late of her Majesty's Indian Civil Service, Member of the Royal Asiatic Society, &c. Pp. 13; tables lx. (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., Ltd., 1898.)