Originally posted by chaney3
There are 4 major points, and nobody is addressing all 4 in their responses:
The orbit of the moon.
The size of the moon.
The size of the sun.
The distance between the moon and the sun.
If any of these were off, even slightly, an eclipse would not be possible.
And you refuse to even acknowledge the moon is receding from Earth at a known rate. I suppose you also are one of those moon landing deniers too. They left a retro-reflector on the moon that routes an incoming laser beam from Earth directly back at Earth so they launch a powerful laser beam for a split second, some of that beam hits the reflector, and a few photons makes their way back to the laser where a detector counts exacly how many seconds have passed between laser start pulse and the return. A known technique, which with radio waves is called Radar. With lasers it is called Lidar.
http://www.lasertech.com/blogs/Traffic-Safety/post/2013/05/15/Difference-Between-Radar-and-Lidar-Explained.aspx
It works EXACTLY the same as a police laser speed detector except it does not use doppler shift to tell the speed, it uses the time of flight of the photons to measure the distance to the moon with an accuracy of 1 centimeter. So after a year, they can see the moon receding on a stately pace of about 1 cm per year. So if you do the math, you can see, say 1 billion years ago, it was 1 billion cm closer, or 100 million meters or 100,000 kilometers and further, a billion years from now, it will be 100,000 km further away rendering it impossible to make a 'perfect' as you call it, eclipse because the moon will be too far away from Earth to completely cover the sun.
It is a total accident of planetary construction that caused that. When the moon formed it was maybe 20,000 km from Earth maximum. Now over ten times that distance. And the distance gets greater every year and that is a fact jack.