When is Easter this year.

Discussion in 'The Commons' started by AnglicanAgnostic, Mar 24, 2022.

  1. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    I seem to recall that they had a full moon on the night of Jesus' arrest.

    Mar 14:51-52 And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body. And they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.

    ;) :halo:
     
  2. AnglicanAgnostic

    AnglicanAgnostic Well-Known Member

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    What I was really getting at but explained badly is- If for arguments sake there was a perfect full moon (at some time during the night) in NZ, by the time you see it in Britain or the middle east say 12 hours later the sun earth and moon have shifted and you will see what is presumably a less than perfect full moon. Now could this waning slightly less than perfect full moon actually be less than the slightly less completely waxing full moon of the night before? So depending how things pan out could your full moon be either before or after ours?
     
    Last edited: Jan 23, 2023
  3. ZachT

    ZachT Well-Known Member

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    No. Everyone experiences the full moon at the exact same moment. If the full moon occurs sometime in the New Zealand evening then it is occurring at precisely the same moment everywhere else in the world, no matter the local time. Someone in London could look up at midday, at precisely the same moment as you are looking up at midnight, and see the full moon. Astronomers can spot the full moon in the middle of the day without any difficulty, they don't need to wait for night time before they can look up. I imagine you can too, unless the day is particularly cloudy.

    Additionally astronomers can very accurately predict when the next full moon will be, down to the second, and they've been capable of predicting it down to the hour for millenia. We can now predict the next full moon for hundreds of years into the future, but back in the day one month in advance was enough.
     
  4. AnglicanAgnostic

    AnglicanAgnostic Well-Known Member

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    I can appreciate the concept of an absolute full moon time, but.......
    My contention is Londoners couldn't see my midnight full moon as they are on the wrong side of the world to see it, and would have to wait for the earth to rotate to see it, thus raising or lowering its " full moonidness".

    Incidentally the moon is moving away from us at 3.8 cm a year. I got my calculator out to work out when this all started. There may be something wrong with my calculator but it keeps giving me 4004BC. Maybe this will Ussher in a new understanding of how the earth may only be a few thousand years old.:D
     
  5. CRfromQld

    CRfromQld Moderator Staff Member

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    You are correct. If they are facing the sun at midday when the moon hits "full" then they won't see it rising for 6 hours by which time it is not quite full. Of course for any particular full moon the corresponding rotation of the Earth will be different.

    I think you'd better check your maths. That simple calculation should give something like 10 billion years. However the rate of recession is not constant and would have been greater in the past.

    The moon could never have been closer than 18,400 km (11,500 miles), known as the Roche Limit, because Earth’s tidal forces (i.e., the result of different gravitational forces on different parts of the moon) would have shattered it. But even if the moon had started receding from being in contact with the earth, it would have taken only 1.37 billion years to reach its present distance. NB: this is the maximum possible age—far too young for evolution (and much younger than the radiometric ‘dates’ assigned to moon rocks)—not the actual age. Ref

    The heavens declare the glory of God,
    and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
     
  6. AnglicanAgnostic

    AnglicanAgnostic Well-Known Member

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    You missed my joke about it all starting in 4004 BC and Usshering in a new understanding.

    From wikipedia

    James Ussher (or Usher; 4 January 1581 – 21 March 1656) was the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625 and 1656. He was a prolific scholar and church leader, who today is most famous for his identification of the genuine letters of the church father, Ignatius of Antioch, and for his chronology that sought to establish the time and date of the creation as "the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October... the year before Christ 4004"; that is, around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC, per the proleptic Julian calendar.
     
  7. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    The moon is actually about 4.5 billion of years old. And evolution happened so obviously there was enough time for it to happen.
     
  8. ZachT

    ZachT Well-Known Member

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    Sure, but the fact that they can't see it is a good indicator the moon is full, right? When the moon is visible at midday you're on the new moon side of the cycle. When the moon is not visible at midday you're on the full-moon side of the cycle. The closer you get to the full moon the less the moon sits in the sky during the day. Sure, you're right, Londoners couldn't actually look up and see the full moon at midday obviously, but an astronomer doesn't need to. I still don't really understand your point.
     
  9. AnglicanAgnostic

    AnglicanAgnostic Well-Known Member

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    I'm beginning to lose track of what it is as well but I'm sure we can agree it's of no great importance.:)
    My musing are, the ancients called a full moon, full when it appeared at its biggest, as opposed to the astronomical; sun, earth, moon perfect alignment.
    Now supposing there was a perfect (astronomical) full moon at 11:30pm in NZ then presumably the night before the moon over London may be say 95% full and the one one night later say 92% full. So the ancients would say their full moon was before New Zealand's.
    Now if the next month NZ's (and astronomical) full moon was at 12:30 am London's full moon may have been 92% the night before and 95% the next night. So the ancients would say their full moon was after ours.
    So London's fullest moon could be a day before ours or a day after. It was this aspect of dating Easter by full moons that I was pondering about (probably fruitlessly).
     
  10. ZachT

    ZachT Well-Known Member

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    Astronomers could know the hour the next moon would be fullest a month in advance by the time the Greeks started writing stuff down again. I don't know how exactly, and Google is being decidedly unhelpful beyond saying "they used special measuring tools", but they haven't needed to eyeball it for several millenia.
     
  11. CRfromQld

    CRfromQld Moderator Staff Member

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    Ah, OK.
     
  12. Mockingbird

    Mockingbird Member

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    Passovers this year:

    Gregorian 14 Nisan: March 25
    Julian 14 Nisan: April 28
    Rabbinic 14 Nisan: April 22
    Samaritan 14 Nisan: April 22

    All dates are in the Gregorian calendar.

    The lateness of the Rabbinic date this year is due to a solar drift in the Rabbinic calendar, causing the Feast of Unleavened Bread to be celebrated, in 3 years out of every 19, at the second full moon after the equinox.

    The lateness of the Julian date this year is due to the lateness of their equinox (13 days late) and the lateness of their full moon (5 days later than the astronomical full moon). The late Feast of Unleavened Bread in the Rabbinic calendar has nothing to do with it.
     
  13. Botolph

    Botolph Well-Known Member

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    As this thread is now two years old, it might help if we included years when referring to dates.