Which eclipses and sky events can be seen from Los Angeles?

Steps

1. For each eclipse in NASA's Five Millennium Catalogs 2026 to 2035 the script computes the Sun and Moon positions from DE440s for Los Angeles (solar: separation of the discs every 2 seconds for 8 hours; lunar: the Moon's distance from the axis of Earth's shadow with Danjon's 1/85 enlargement), finds the contacts by interpolation and the Sun or Moon altitude, and compares with NASA.
2. Solar: topocentric apparent positions, Sun radius 696,000 km, Moon radius 0.2725076 Earth radii (Earth radius 6378.14 km), geometric altitude; Los Angeles at sea level. Lunar: geocentric positions, Danjon enlargement 1/85 of Earth's radius in both shadow cones. Meteor shower peak: the date the Sun's J2000 ecliptic longitude equals the shower's solar longitude in the IAU MDC list (the entry with the most orbits).
3. Meteor showers: the peak night is the American Meteor Society's for 2026 / 2027. The IAU Meteor Data Center's solar longitude (its entry with the most orbits) is turned into a date with the Sun's J2000 ecliptic longitude and compared.

45 NASA eclipses for 2026 to 2035 (22 solar, 23 lunar), 10 NASA Los Angeles rows, 80 lunar catalog rows, 9 meteor showers. Unit: Times are shown in Pacific time (PST or PDT) and in UTC. Solar magnitude is the fraction of the Sun's diameter covered, obscuration the fraction of its area. Lunar umbral magnitude is the fraction of the Moon's diameter inside Earth's dark shadow. Altitude is geometric (no refraction), above the horizon at sea level.. Every derived figure on this page (changes, indexes, averages, counts) is computed from the published rows, and the table under each chart says how.

Checks

• Local solar circumstances: every Los Angeles row of NASA's catalog from 2001 to 2035 (10) is recomputed: maximum within 36 seconds, begin and end within a minute, Sun altitude within 0.5 and azimuth within 0.6 degrees, magnitude within 0.0013, obscuration within 0.0016. The script stops if any difference exceeds its limit.
• The set of eclipses visible from Los Angeles equals NASA's Los Angeles catalog for 2001 to 2035. Our own finder (new and full moons close to a node) finds the same 22 solar and 23 lunar eclipses as NASA's catalog for 2026 to 2035.
• Lunar eclipses: all 80 in NASA's global catalog from 2001 to 2035 are recomputed: greatest eclipse within 1.8 seconds, gamma within 0.0001, umbral and penumbral magnitudes within 0.0033, phase durations within 2.5 minutes except grazing events (2013-04-25, 2013-05-25, 2015-04-04, 2027-07-18, 2034-09-28), whose duration changes by minutes for a hair's difference in the shadow size.
• The terms are read from the NASA pages (reproduction is permitted with the acknowledgment 'Eclipse Predictions by Fred Espenak, NASA's GSFC'); the IAU Meteor Data Center list and the American Meteor Society calendar are parsed and each shower is checked.
• The brief's Los Angeles point (118.25 W) and NASA's (118 14.0 W) are 1.5 km apart: the magnitude is the same to three decimals and the time of maximum moves by 3 seconds at most.

Caveats

• The times use the ephemeris and Skyfield's delta T (about 69 s), not the 75 to 77 s NASA predicts for these years; the difference moves the local clock times by under 10 seconds. Delta T for 2030 to 2035 is a prediction. Lunar eclipse visibility counts any time the Moon is above the horizon during the umbral (or, for penumbral eclipses, penumbral) phase; weather, hills and city light are not considered. Penumbral eclipses are faint. Shower peak dates are the date of the shower's mean solar longitude, which can differ from the observed maximum by half a day or more; rates depend on the Moon and the sky.
• Eclipse visibility here is astronomical: weather, haze, buildings and hills are not considered. Sun altitudes are geometric; refraction raises a low Sun by about half a degree.
• Times use the U.S. daylight saving rule as it is today (PDT from March to November); a change in the law would shift the clock times by an hour.

Releases and revisions

• NASA's catalogs are fixed predictions. Re-run space_eclipses.py to rebuild. The next solar eclipse visible from Los Angeles is Jan 14, 2029.
• NASA's predictions are fixed; a later measurement of the Earth's rotation (delta T) changes the times by seconds. The meteor calendar covers Oct 2026 to Oct 2027 and is republished each year by the AMS.