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From Wikipedia's Baily's beads:

Lunar topography has considerable relief because of the presence of mountains, craters, valleys and other topographical features. The irregularities of the lunar limb profile (the "edge" of the Moon, as seen from a distance) are known accurately from observations of grazing occultations of stars. Astronomers thus have a fairly good idea which mountains and valleys will cause the beads to appear in advance of the eclipse. While Baily's beads are seen briefly for a few seconds at the center of the eclipse path, their duration is maximized near the edges of the path of the umbra, lasting around 90 seconds.

The article asserts without support that "Astronomers thus have a fairly good idea which mountains and valleys will cause the beads to appear..." and I am sure it's absolutely possible considering how well the lunar topography has been mapped and the celestial mechanics and rigid body motions of the relevant bodies have been ephemerized.

But I've never actually seen a bead-attribution, much less a bead-prediction.

So I'd like to ask:

Question: Has anyone attributed a specific Baily's bead to a specific feature on the Moon? If so, when was this first done?

Please cite or link to specific examples.

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  • $\begingroup$ I think you need to ask when was the first publication of this. Anyone with a telescope and a clock could have worked it out and left no notes. $\endgroup$
    – eshaya
    Commented Apr 17 at 12:31
  • $\begingroup$ @eshaya answers must be supported by citing authoritative sources, so the requirement for a publication is sort-of implicit here, because this is Stack Exchange. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Apr 17 at 13:39
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    $\begingroup$ Xavier Jubier's simulator maps them all. Such a model only requires a moon model and position data. Since it hardly provides any scientific value, I doubt much has been written about it.xjubier.free.fr/en/site_pages/solar_eclipses/… $\endgroup$
    – Greg Miller
    Commented Apr 17 at 21:48
  • $\begingroup$ @GregMiller Hey thanks! I'm thinking that when the beads were first explained, it was a big deal, because before then they were not understood at all. However, the explanation was really just a theory, and it needed to be tested and verified. So I'm pretty confident there will be scientific literature at some point. The Moon's libration means that a feature that's on the limb at one point in time will also be turned a little bit toward us at another. So it might even be possible that once good lunar photographic maps (from Earth) became possible, one could match a given bead to a given feature $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Apr 17 at 22:03
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    $\begingroup$ I don't know if Chester Watt's work published in 1963 was the first or not. See en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_limb His work was used by IOTA to produce grazing occultation predictions, so it would have been accurate enough for Bailey bead predictions. Whether it was and whether it was done beforehand still needs to be determined. $\endgroup$
    – JohnHoltz
    Commented Apr 17 at 22:22

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