After discovering our small ad in the August 2002 issue of Sky & Telescope* and looking over some of the information presented on the website of the Sirius Research Group, someone was wondering:

"Your latest so-called proof seems to suggest that the sidereal year is of no relevance to the saros. Yet 18.6134 tropical years are equal in time to 18.6127 sidereal years. Am I missing something here?"

* A similar ad appears in the recent issue of the German astronomy magazine Sterne & Weltraum

http://www.wissenschaft-online.de/blatt/d_suw_kl_anzeigen&typ=Angebot&_typ=Angebot

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Yes, both periods are equal to 6798.4014364 mean solar days of 86400 seconds. That's because the calculation is based on the rigorous relationship between the (360-degree) tropical and the draconic lunar month. There are exactly 248.82898075 tropical lunar months and 249.82898075 draconic months in the same period.

What you are missing is the fact that the Saros cycle is NOT based on and derived from a roughly 6.8 second longer sidereal orbital period of the moon around the earth and a roughly twenty minutes longer orbital period of the earth around the sun. Such longer orbit periods (supposedly 360-degree according to lunisolar precession) would result into a [non-existing] Saros cycle of about 6793.51 mean solar days, which is almost FIVE days shorter than it is in reality!

The rotation axis of the earth - and therefore the observer's meridian - is NOT precessing between the sun and the moon, as the advocates of lunisolar precession wrongly assert.

It appears the moon's cycle and the movement of its shadow is tied to a moving sun (around Sirius) and to the age-old astrological signs of the zodiac, rather than to a stationary sun and to modern astronomy's "elusive" sidereal year.

SRG

see also http://www.binaryresearchinstitute.org/evidence/lunarcycle.shtml