The most important question is, when will I see one! Eclipses occur in groups of two or three, at intervals of a little less than 6 months. But when you can see one from your part of the world is much more complex. This section contains lots of resources to help you find the answer:

We have special regional pages for some parts of the world:

Note that the "headline date" of each eclipse is based on Universal Time; the actual time and date of an eclipse may be different in your time zone. You can select your preferred timezone for the actual timings of the phases of an eclipse. We have a special page with more information:

You might be interested in eclipses in the past, or farther in the future. To help with this we have a comprehensive database of eclipses spanning 5,000 years, plus an eclipse search engine, in the Eclipse Database section.

But When Will I See One?

So how often is an eclipse visible from a certain part of the Earth? The answer is different for different types of eclipse:

Solar Eclipses

It would be easy to say that eclipses happen "at random", but that's not true, of course. Basically, the set of circumstances that lead to an eclipse is really complex. It's totally deterministic, in that it depends on the motions of the Earth and Moon, which are known precisely and which are totally predictable. That's why we can predict eclipses so far in advance. But it's so complex that the distribution of eclipses is effectively "random" — i.e. they're scattered all over the Earth with no easily discernible pattern.

This means that two total solar eclipses can appear in the same place within a year, or a within few years — or a given location may go thousands of years without seeing one. The average time between total solar eclipses in a given place is something like 360 years, but it's so variable that that doesn't really help much.

Check out the solar eclipse listing for a list and maps of solar eclipses, and you'll see how they're popping up all over the place. The listing of UK eclipses should give you an idea of what kind of a lottery it is for any given place. If you're interested, you can go on to read about the mechanics behind this.

Lunar Eclipses

Lunar eclipses are different; since they occur on the Moon, any location on Earth which can see the Moon at the time can see the eclipse. Since a lunar eclipse happens at the full Moon, you will see it basically if it happens at night in your local time; so your chance of seeing a particular lunar eclipse is about 50-50. It's a little more complex than that, because the Earth turns during the eclipse, but that's not far off.

You can check out the lunar eclipse listing for maps showing where on Earth lunar eclipses can be seen from. You can read about how lunar eclipses work if you're still confused.

By the Numbers

And finally, the statistics page shows you how often particular types of eclipse occur.