Due to the special religious significance of solar and lunar eclipses in Tibetan Buddhism, ancient Tibetan astronomers placed great emphasis on predicting these celestial events. Tibetan historical texts preserve numerous records of eclipse predictions and observations. The Tibetan manuscript Chronological Predictions and Observational Records of Solar and Lunar Eclipses Occurring Here documents 36 prediction and observation records of eclipses between 1544 and 1616 by Tibetan astronomers. This study employs Python to simulate the Five Elements and Rahu algorithms from the classical Tibetan Kalachakra text Me Mkha' Rgya Mtsho and recalculates the 36 eclipse predictions in the manuscript using the eclipse computation method from zla 'dzin gsal ba'i sgron me. Additionally, theoretical eclipse data extracted from the astronomical software SkyMap Pro7 were used to evaluate the reliability of the manuscript's prediction and observation records. The findings reveal that the initial eclipse contact times calculated using Me Mkha' Rgya Mtsho and zla 'dzin gsal ba'i sgron me exhibited significant errors. However, by applying a correction of 1 mark (24 minutes) every 46 years to the initial contact times of the 36 eclipses in the manuscript, the mean absolute error for the 7 solar eclipse records decreased from 172 minutes to 123 minutes, while that for the 27 lunar eclipse records decreased from 114 minutes to 63 minutes. This research provides valuable insights for objectively evaluating the predictive accuracy of eclipses in the Tibetan Kalachakra tradition.
CAI et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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