BROKEN WINDOWS

Sunday, November 9, 2003

Since he knows so much about these things, I've asked my husband to write about the lunar eclipse. Here it is!

A picture named venustable.jpg

The drawing above comes from the Preshispanic Dresden Codex, a Maya document complete with hieroglyphic writing. This codex was found in the basement of the Dresden library by a librarian (Ernst Forsteman) who recognized the hieroglyphs.

Eclipses
A solar eclipse occurs when the moon is between the earth and the sun. Because the moon is so much smaller than the sun or earth, and the sun is so bright, solar eclipses are rarely noticed unless they are total, or when the disc of the moon covers the disc of the sun entirely. Even then, they can only be seen along a very narrow band of the planet. Of course, a solar eclipse can only occur when there is a new moon.

A lunar eclipse happens when the earth comes between the sun and the moon, and although they occur less frequently, they can be seen from anywhere on the earth's surface. Lunar eclipses can only occur at or very close to a full moon.

If the moon revolved around the earth in the same plane that the earth revolves around the sun, we would have a solar and a lunar eclipse every month. However, this is not the case, and because of the moon's funky orbit, these two paths cross approximately every 173 days-known as the eclipse half year. In actuality, an eclipse can occur within 18 days on either side of the path crossing (also known as the precession of the nodes).

The Dresden Codex Eclipse Table
The Maya were very interested in the movements of celestial bodies because they believed that earthly predictions could be made based on celestial events. In their books, they kept very detailed information concerning the movements of Venus, Mars, and other bodies; some have not yet been decifered. In any case, the diagram above is a prediction table based on eclipse events. The large black/white yin/yang like glyphs are different versions of the Maya symbol for an eclipse. The bottom and top "registers" are separated by a thick line in the center of the page, essentially dividing it into two pages

Along the bottom of the table, the number 148 (to the left of the eclipse glyph in the top register) is followed by the number 177 repeated 7 times.

177 days is equal to 6 synodic months, or the time it takes for the moon to go from full to new and back to full (29.5 days). The number 148 is equal to 5 synodic months. These periods are close approximations to the eclipse half year of 173 days based on the moon's cycle with a correction thrown in (148) to make up for the 4 (177-173) day difference (28 days over 7 cycles) over time. Located above the periods are Mayan divinatory calendar dates, which can be correlated with our gregorian calendar. When checking these dates with astronomical software, one finds that each one falls within a possible lunar or solar eclipse event. Thus, the Maya could accurately predict when an eclipse was going to occur over a very long period of time.

9:03:07 PM |

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