You can’t deny that there’s something quite spectacular about an eclipse.

Even a lunar eclipse is cool, but a fully-fledged solar eclipse? There really is nothing like it.

And fascinatingly, the ancient Maya civilization agreed – and were so fascinated by eclipses and the mysteries of the skies and the universe above them, that they used their groundbreaking knowledge of maths and astronomy to track and predict them.

Perhaps even more fascinatingly, their predictions were astoundingly accurate.

According to a new study from researchers at the University at Albany, New York, which was recently published in the journal Science Advances, eclipse predictions within the Dresden Codex were not only accurate, they were infinitely detailed.

In their paper, the researchers unpacked exactly how the Maya astrological calendar worked. Though it doesn’t align with our own, present way of thinkings, the ancient astrological calendar marked out a 405-month lunar cycle that linked up with the traditional astrological calendar used by ancient Maya people, which was 260 days long.

And this, the researchers concluded in their paper, was how this ancient civilisation predicted eclipses with such incredible accuracy:

“Mayan calendar specialists anticipated solar eclipses by correlating their occurrences with dates in their 260-day divinatory calendar. The 405-month eclipse table had emerged from a lunar calendar in which the 260-day divinatory calendar commensurated the lunar cycle.”

Moreover, the researchers found that the Maya model didn’t just use one calendar on a cycle.

Instead, they actually realigned their calendars in line with their astrological observations, meaning that it became something of a dynamic document that get more and more accurate over time.

And by doing so, as the authors note, they were able to predict centuries worth of eclipses using only their own observations and the astrological and mathematic knowledge that their civilization brought to the world.

We might think that our scientists are leading the future now, but this ancient civilization’s level of insight and innovation truly is remarkable.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?