[Lonesome in Massachussets]

It was on two days. 22 and 23rd.

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.

[KarlInOhio]

The Pagans appear to be correct on this one.

But it looks like they count their days like the Jewish calendar does. Since the solstice was after sunset their solstice festivities were supposed to take place on the next sunrise on December 22.

The article didn't say if a real crowd showed up on the 22nd and the 21st group were just a bunch of screwups, or if the 300 on the 21st were the main crowd.

[cliff630]

Consider all these motions:
(1) the earth’s rotation about its axis
(2) the rotation of the earth’s axis (equinox precession)
(3) the changing of the earth’s orbit (many different
motions here: the oscillations of the orbit, the
shape of the orbit
(4) the sun enjoys a few of these as our system rotates
about/within our galaxy.

My thinking is that all of these rotations are the main
driving force for climate change. The sun is giving off
billions of rays of heat but the intensity & durations
of those rays is changing every millesecond.

Visualize a gyroscope which demonstrates pitch, yaw &
roll. Now cascade them into boxes which act like
gyroscopes. Now you see why these pseudo-experts want
to blame CO2. That’s much easier mathematically than trying to study all these motions.

Makes one dizzy when one tries to visualize all this,
doesn’t it? Your thoughts?