Posted on 12/25/2009 4:14:30 AM PST by Brugmansian
Pagan worshippers, who braved freezing dawn temperatures to celebrate the winter solstice at Stonehenge, were dismayed to discover they had turned up on the wrong day . . .
Pagan leader Arthur Pendragon said: "It is the most important day of the year for us . . ."
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Well, duh!
As usual the no brain non thinking crowd showing their stupidity.
Brilliant!
Well, in college one year I showed up a day early for the Fall semester.
Got dressed, carried my books, pulled into the parking lot .... wondered why it was so empty. Then, carried my books all the way to the deserted campus. A custodian chuckled “You here a day early, arncha?”
I never told my boss, who gave me the day off.
It was on two days. 22 and 23rd.
That would be much more meaningful ~ and it would also be more reflective of what ancient people did.
RUH ROH
Perhaps they should just celebrate George Castanza’s “Festovus” holiday, started by his dad. Just as valid as the pegan party.
“It is the most important day of the year for us . . .”
Yeah,,,so important you can’t figure out when it is....
No the "official" solstice, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory was December 21, 2009 at 17:47 UT. The formal definition of the solstice is not particularly intuitive, but it would be safe to say that the date of the solstice corresponds, more of less, to the day when the noon day sun is as low in the Northern Hemisphere sky as it will get all year. The Pagans appear to be correct on this one.
For people living in time zones more than 6 hours and 13 minutes ahead of Greenwich, the December Solstice will indeed have occured on December 22, since the clock already passed midnight.
This graph illustrates the effect of the Gregorian Calendar leap year schedule on the UT date of the solstice. The four year leap year period accounts for most of the difference between the mean solar year and 365 days. Every hundred years we skip a leap year to correct for the century long drift of about a quarter of 3/4 of a day per century and every 400 years (e.g., 2000) we skip skipping a year to account for the quarter of a day difference that would accumulate over the centuries.
Unfortunately, the mean solar year is not exactly 365.2425 days, nor any rational fraction of a day nor even constant. A future pope will have to reform the calendar again.
I just hate it when that happens.
This year Iran's Grand Ayatollah made the declaration a day earlier frosting millions of Sunnis.
Once in elementary school I walked all the way to school through the snow, wondering why the streets were so empty of other kids, and arrived at school to find the doors closed for a snow day.
Kind of a weird feeling, as I remember it. (I was only 10 or 11 years old.)
Pagan leader Arthur Pendragon said: "It is the most important day of the year for us because it welcomes in the new sun. There were hundreds of people there. If we'd celebrated on the 21st it would have been the right day but the wrong sun – when the whole point of the occasion is about welcoming in the new sun.In what sense is the sun "new"? In what way is the sun itself affected by the tilt of the earth and the earth's position in its own orbit?
Stupid as astrology, and equally meaningless.
It’s always 5:00 somewhere, so — it was right day, wrong place.
HO! HO! HO!
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