Dear Brent, I understand your excitement...
> In my excitement I forgot that solstice > to solstice is not one year but only one > half of a year. But is isn't :-( The best you can say is that it is ABOUT half a year. The Earth doesn't have a circular orbit and the solstices don't coincide with neat points on the elliptical orbit. In consequence, the time from the December Solstice to the June Solstice is not the same as the time from the June Solstice to the December Solstice. Life is tough! And it gets tougher... A commonly-agreed reference point in the year is the Spring Equinox and you would be on reasonably firm ground if you said you would deem the period from one Spring Equinox to the next to be "one year". You could then sub-divide that in the manner you have proposed. The only snag is that this period varies slightly (by a small number of minutes) from one year to the next. Eventually, even Pope Gregory XIII realised that he had a tough problem on his hands. For all its faults, it is hard to think of any other scheme ascribed to any other individual that affects the lives of almost everyone on the planet literally every day over 400 years after being implemented. I suddenly feel Pope Gregory's scheme has something going for it after all :-) I feel he is smiling benignly at us. Frank --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
