The Winter Solstice

during fasting. I start seeing things too when I don't eat anything and drink wine.

It's when the geographic north pole is pointing as far away from the sun as it does during the year.

This has been an announcement for the education of DUers.

Black fractal tubes can kiss my arse.

but I believe it can happen on different dates and times of day on those dates the OP stated.

I could be remembering wrong, but I believe determing the exact solstice wasn't always easy - and now that it is, they're keeping this ritual anyway because they like it :-).

By 'rather modern,' I mean 2-300 years ish.

Once you have timepieces that can time sunrise and sunset to within a few seconds, and if you're confident of judging the same event each day (eg 'when the first part of the sun appears over the horizon) that accurately, I'd think you could get it fairly accurate (for instance, the length of days in London shows that 21st Dec sunrise to sunset is within a second of the 22nd Dec value, 20th Dec and 23rd Dec are 6 seconds longer, and so on, so from that you can deduce the solstice is within an hour or two of the midnight between 21st and 22nd). In terms of the point at which sunset or sunrise occurs on the horizon, 6 seconds is 1/14,400 of a circle, or 1/2292 radians - so that would be judging 1cm at a distance of 22.9m, which would be pretty tricky with the naked eye, I'd think. It might have had to wait for the invention of the telescope to be accurate.

But the basic reason the time of the solstice varies is because of the number of days in the solar year not being an integer - the same as the reason for having leap years. So I think that with the combined records of several years' observations, the same reasoning that led to the use of leap years should have allowed them to work out roughly when each succeeding solstice would be, compared to the last - about 6 hours difference each year, with a jump of 18 hours in the other direction very 4 years. When they were using the Julian calendar, such an estimate would gradually have built up errors. According to Wikipedia, they'd noticed the error for the vernal equinox between about 325AD and 725AD - which should be about 3 days (because the Julian calendar is out by 3 days every 400 years). The way the Wikipedia article is written, it may well have been the equinox/solstice observation dates that told them how to get the leap years more accurate. And once they'd worked out the Gregorian calendar, I think they'd be able to get the changes in the winter solstice time pretty accurate.

I have no objection to people fasting and perhaps getting a bit drunk as a ritual; it's the modern guy elsewhere talking guff about 'black fractal tubes' and doing it between 3 and 4 am to 'minimise psychic interference' I object to - because he should know when the actual solstice is, but is using mumbo-jumbo to tell people to do it at a different time.

Lemonaide diet

http://lemonadedietrecipe.org/


10 days no food.

you have to respect their devotion. Love it.

Devotion to superstition is not a respectable behavior. They are no better than fundies.

I married on the exact time years ago.

:)

the birth of the Son.
;-)

Oh brother. :eyes:

new flurry of nasty black fractal tubes... :(

to put in the black fractal tubes so I could ping some people in the head. :evilgrin:

The black snake is how the fractal tubes wrap around us when we fight except one can see inside the black tubes, they usually have red or red and back balls or circles inside the tubes (sw)

Sometimes he makes sense.

Most of the time he's full of broccoli.

Full moon - 21 December 2010, 09:13:30 am (Full Cold Moon)

Total lunar eclipse - Penumbral Eclipse Begins: 05:29:17 UT 21 Dec 2010
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/OHfigures/OH2010-Fig04.pdf

Winter Solstice 21 December 2010 23:38 (or 11.38pm) Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)

The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, and it has not fallen on the same day as a lunar eclipse since 1554, according to NASA.

If so, I'm 6 hrs behind in Central Standard Time, I believe.

I think UTC is based on the atomic clock that compensates for leap.

Almost forty of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_solstice#Observances