#equinoxes — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #equinoxes, aggregated by home.social.
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But, as we now know, the #JulianCalendar's mean year is about 11 minutes 15 seconds longer than the #TropicalYear, and by the 4th century AD, the dates of the #solstices and #equinoxes had drifted from their official dates by several days.
In the 16th century, #Pope Gregory XIII used his authority as #PontifexMaximus to reform the calendar again, because that is something #popes can do.
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But, as we now know, the #JulianCalendar's mean year is about 11 minutes 15 seconds longer than the #TropicalYear, and by the 4th century AD, the dates of the #solstices and #equinoxes had drifted from their official dates by several days.
In the 16th century, #Pope Gregory XIII used his authority as #PontifexMaximus to reform the calendar again, because that is something #popes can do.
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@Gila I've a similar attitude to all #holidays that are #culturally or #socially sanctioned.
#Solstices and #Equinoxes I give a hoot about: they are definitive physical manifestations of our little blue and green ball flying round the fireball sun.
They mark the seasons; planting, growing, harvesting, hibernating.
Random picture:
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I had one of those “Why didn’t that ever occur to me before?” moments. The time between the #Equinoxes is not symmetrical. It’s about 186 days between the #March and #September equinoxes and about 179 days from September to March. This is because the speed of the #Earth in its #orbit varies as it’s #elliptical rather than circular. I never bothered to count the days and yet it’s “obvious” when you look at the calendar. This gives an eccentricity of the orbit to be around 0.015.
