When it comes to making data visually engaging, sometimes nature does the work for you. That’s the case with these scatter plots, which simply show how attributes of solar eclipses vary as a function of latitude. The data come from the supplementary material for “Five Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses: -1999 to +3000" (NASA/TP-2009-214174), which includes 11,898 past and future solar eclipses. Similar to my Earth’s spinning speed graphic, I’ve plotted latitude on the y-axis for geographic purposes, even though it should be thought of as the independent variable in most of the graphs.

I’ve defined some of the terms on the graphic to help with the interpretation. If you aren’t familiar with the concepts, check out the second data source, which is a good resource for understanding solar eclipses.

Data sources:

Eclipse Predictions by Fred Espenak (NASA’s GSFC)

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEpubs/5MKSE.html

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/solar.html