From - Sky & Telescope By - Fred Espenak Edited by - Amal Udawatta This clay cuneiform tablet records lunar eclipses between 609 and 447 BC. The Babylonians also recorded solar eclipses. © The Trustees of the British Museum Before the advent of computers or even a working theory of the solar system, the ancients predicted solar eclipses. How did they do it? Today's astronomers use electronic computers and mathematical models to calculate the motions of the Sun and the Moon. This information can then be used to predict when solar (and lunar) eclipses take place. But the ability to predict eclipses goes back more than 25 centuries ago. This is long before the advent of computers or even Copernicus's heliocentric theory needed to understand the motions of the Sun and the Moon. So how could ancient civilizations foresee the occurrence of eclipses? They used a clever idea called the Saros cycle. In a previous post “ How Rare is a Total Solar Eclipse? ”, I described the two c