[time-nuts] MesoAmerican calendars, Solstice, etc.

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Mon Dec 17 19:31:51 UTC 2012


You knew it would be coming..

A discussion over lunch brought up the question of precisely WHEN this 
Maya calendar rollover/civilization ending event would occur.  It's not 
enough to just say "dec 21st".. Does the event occur at the beginning of 
the day, end of the day, in which local time scale.. Local news media 
and the blogosphere are woefully ignorant of such basic questions which 
time-nuts learn to ask at their mother's knee.

I did find a reference that it's tied to the Solstice, or which we have 
a fairly precise instant:  1112UTC  (although I've seen other numbers 
floating around).  So, basically, I could not have to worry about going 
into work on Friday, because all the excitement will be over here in the 
Pacific Time zone(but I will have to get up real early to see it happen)

But just like other time scales, how did those mesoAmericans reconcile 
their 360 day cycle to 365.25... day intervals between solstices?

I've been rummaging through my ION CD of time and celestial nav papers, 
but didn't find anything at first on the whole issue (plenty on other 
astronomically derived scales).

Anybody have any decent links to go hunting for?

5000 years is plenty long for significant precession of the equninoxes, 
for instance.. Maybe those Maya astronomers did a bang up job measuring, 
but hey, they probably didn't account for those higher order effects.







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