[meteorite-list] AD. Japan Meteorite Falls/Finds/Hammerspageupdated with more than 50 links

From: Rob Wesel <rob_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2007 17:16:52 -0800
Message-ID: <005d01c82a49$de699620$749da043_at_windows9bb74fe>

OK, so +/- 6 days then.

Just busting chops Sterling, your posts are always amazingly insightful,
thanks for that.

You and Bernd...juggernauts...or robots...need to run some tests.

Rob Wesel
http://www.nakhladogmeteorites.com
------------------
We are the music makers...
and we are the dreamers of the dreams.
Willy Wonka, 1971



----- Original Message -----
From: "Sterling K. Webb" <sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Cc: "drtanuki" <drtanuki at yahoo.com>; "Rob Wesel"
<rob at nakhladogmeteorites.com>
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2007 4:59 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] AD. Japan Meteorite
Falls/Finds/Hammerspageupdated with more than 50 links


> Hi, Rob, List,
>
> You couldn't have found a nicer mess to land in: calendars!
>
> Simple answers first: if a source specifies "Julian calendar"
> for the date of an event, it almost certainly means the event's date
> in the Julian calendar system, proposed and enforced by Augustus,
> Julius Caesar's adopted son and first Emperor of Rome.
>
> By the time Pope Gregory XIII decided the calendarical slide had
> gone far enough, the Julian calendar of 1700 and the astronomical
> calendar were 11 days apart, by the 1800's when Protestant Europe
> adopted the "Gregorian" calendar, it was 12 days off. By 1917, when
> revolutionary Russians changed their calendars, it was 13 days. The
> Julian lags by one day every 143 years (since Year 1 AD).
>
> So, an event in 861 is off (behind) by about 6.021 days, or
> in practical terms 6 days. But it's messier than that. For example,
> when does a year begin? Jan. 1? No, not for most of the past
> two millennia. Do climate scientists who evaluate temperature
> records from the past centuries for proof of global warming
> actually know what day of the year is meant in the records?
> (The answer to that one is no.) Were calendars, at a given time,
> the same in all countries? No.
>
> JULIAN CALENDAR
>
> The Roman calendar began the year on 1 January, and this remained
> the start of the year after the Julian reform. However, even after local
> calendars were aligned to the Julian calendar, they started the new year
> on different dates. The Alexandrian calendar in Egypt started on 29
> August (30 August after an Alexandrian leap year). Several local
> provincial calendars were aligned to start on the birthday of Augustus,
> 23 September. The indiction caused the Byzantine year, which used
> the Julian calendar, to begin on 1 September; this date is still used in
> the Eastern Orthodox Church for the beginning of the liturgical year.
> When the Julian calendar was adopted in Russia in AD 988 by
> Vladimir I of Kiev, the year was numbered Anno Mundi 6496,
> beginning on 1 March, six months after the start of the Byzantine
> Anno Mundi year with the same number. In 1492 (AM 7000),
> Ivan III, according to church tradition, realigned the start of the
> year to 1 September, so that AM 7000 only lasted for six months
> in Russia, from 1 March to 31 August 1492.
>
> During the Middle Ages 1 January retained the name New Year's
> Day (or an equivalent name) in all Western European countries
> (affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church), since the medieval
> calendar continued to display the months from January to December
> (in twelve columns containing 28 to 31 days each), just as the
> Romans had. However, most of those countries began their
> numbered year on 25 December (the Nativity of Jesus), 25 March
> (the Incarnation of Jesus), or even Easter, as in France.
>
> In England before 1752, 1 January was celebrated as the
> New Year festival, but the "year starting 25th March was
> called the Civil or Legal Year, although the phrase Old Style
> was more commonly used." To reduce misunderstandings
> on the date, it was not uncommon in parish registers for a
> new year heading after 24 March for example 1661 had
> another heading at the end of the following December
> indicating "1661/62". This was to explain to the reader
> that the year was 1661 Old Style and 1662 New Style.
>
> Most Western European countries shifted the first day of
> their numbered year to 1 January while they were still using
> the Julian calendar, before they adopted the Gregorian calendar,
> many during the sixteenth century. The following table shows
> the years in which various countries adopted 1 January as the
> start of the year. Eastern European countries, with populations
> showing allegiance to the Orthodox Church, began the year on
> 1 September from about 988.
>
> Note that as a consequence of change of New Year,
> 1 January 1751 to 24 March 1751 are non-existent dates
> in England.
>
> The Julian calendar was in general use in Europe and Northern
> Africa from the times of the Roman Empire until 1582, when
> Pope Gregory XIII promulgated the Gregorian Calendar.
> Reform was required because too many leap days are added
> with respect to the astronomical seasons on the Julian scheme.
> On average, the astronomical solstices and the equinoxes
> advance by about 11 minutes per year against the Julian year.
> As a result, the calculated date of Easter gradually moved out
> of phase with the moon. While Hipparchus and presumably
> Sosigenes were aware of the discrepancy, although not of its
> correct value, it was evidently felt to be of little importance at
> the time of the Julian reform. However, it accumulated significantly
> over time: the Julian calendar gained a day about every 134 years.
> By 1582, it was ten days out of alignment.
>
> The Gregorian Calendar was soon adopted by most Catholic
> countries (e.g. Spain, Portugal, Poland, most of Italy). Protestant
> countries followed later, and the countries of Eastern Europe
> even later. In the British Empire (including the American colonies),
> Wednesday 2 September 1752 was followed by Thursday
> 14 September 1752. For 12 years from 1700 Sweden used a
> modified Julian Calendar, and adopted the Gregorian calendar
> in 1753, but Russia remained on the Julian calendar until 1917,
> after the Russian Revolution (which is thus called the 'October
> Revolution' though it occurred in Gregorian November), while
> Greece continued to use it until 1923. During this time the Julian
> calendar continued to diverge from the Gregorian. In 1700 the
> difference became 11 days; in 1800, 12; and in 1900, 13, where
> it will stay till 2100.
>
> Although all Eastern Orthodox countries (most of them in Eastern
> or Southeastern Europe) had adopted the Gregorian calendar by
> 1927, their national churches had not. A revised Julian calendar
> was proposed during a synod in Constantinople in May 1923,
> consisting of a solar part which was and will be identical to the
> Gregorian calendar until the year 2800, and a lunar part which
> calculated Easter astronomically at Jerusalem. All Orthodox
> churches refused to accept the lunar part, so almost all Orthodox
> churches continue to celebrate Easter according to the Julian
> calendar (the Finnish Orthodox Church uses the Gregorian Easter).
>
> The solar part of the revised Julian calendar was accepted by
> only some Orthodox churches. Those that did accept it, with
> hope for improved dialogue and negotiations with the Western
> denominations, were the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople,
> the Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, the Orthodox Churches
> of Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria (the last in 1963),
> and the Orthodox Church in America (although some OCA parishes
> are permitted to use the Julian calendar). Thus these churches
> celebrate the Nativity on the same day that Western Christians do,
> 25 December Gregorian until 2800. The Orthodox Churches of
> Jerusalem, Russia, Macedonia, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and the
> Greek Old Calendarists continue to use the Julian calendar for their
> fixed dates, thus they celebrate the Nativity on 25 December Julian
> (which is 7 January Gregorian until 2100).
>
>
> And...
>
> Here's a further deeper sample of calendrical complexity (largely
> caged from Duncan Steel's book "Marking Time").
>
> Some examples: Should one use local solar time, local mean
> solar time, or standard time? (Prior to the International Meridian
> Conference in 1884, the records of that meeting indicate that only
> four nations followed standard time systems: the UK, the USA
> and Canada - but only just for those two, from the year before.
> The Netherlands did not become part of the international standard
> time system until 1954, for example.
>
> With the leap year scheme used in the Western calendar the
> time of the vernal equinox ranges over 53 hours within 19-21 March,
> producing a corresponding variation in the solar longitudes at which
> January, or any other month, occurs.
>
> It has been assumed for a long time that the seasonal year follows
> the spacing between the equinoxes and solstices, the *average* such time
> being the familiar *tropical year* of 365.2422 days when again averaged
> over
> some dozens of orbits. This assumption seems to be wrong. The
> cycle time of the seasons over the past several centuries (since
> temperature
> records began) is actually the anomalistic year, the time between
> perihelion
> passages, which is near 365.2596 days again when suitably averaged.
> Because perihelion passage shifts later by about one day every 58 years
> on the Western calendar, this would imply that not only does 'January'
> oscillate by 53 hours in the leap year cycle, but also the current (2002)
> January is shifted, seasonally-speaking, by more than two days compared
> to 'January' back in 1867.
>
> Apart from anything else, if one kept a calendar held steady
> against the perihelion position (and hence the seasonal cycle *at
> present* - I would anticipate that this cyclicity is only temporary for
> some centuries until perihelion moves far enough away from the winter
> solstice to lose the resonance) then the 24-hour period labelled 'January
> 31st (Eastern Standard Time)' would in the past have been in February.
>
> This all comes back to the calendar one uses. I have employed the
> term 'Western calendar', It is a fallacy that the calendar used as the
> world-wide standard (with local or religious calendars also employed)
> is the 'Gregorian calendar.' That is an ecclesiastical calendar adopted
> by-and-large only in various Catholic states around 1582-1610,
> persisting since in Italy and Spain. Elsewhere solar calendars have
> been legally adopted (by other countries) in which the same
> (inaccurate) leap year rule as the Gregorian happens to be used.
> The Western calendar derives basically through the major powers:
> Britain's calendar reform of 1751, which was inherited by the
> American colonies and thence by the initial founding states of the
> USA (note that the USA does not have any legal calendar code of its own,
> the familiar system is just used by common assent there and hence
> elsewhere). It is this which may be termed the 'Western calendar'.
>
> But that does not make the Western calendar the same as the Gregorian.
> There are several very significant differences. The Gregorian is a
> luni-solar calendar in that it provides for a lunar cycle as well as
> a solar sycle. Everyone knows about the leap-year corrections (three
> in 400 are dropped: 1700, 1800, 1900, 2100...) but few know also of
> the lunar jumps: the lunar phase (the phase of the ecclesiastical moon,
> not the real moon) is assumed to follow the Metonic cycle of 19 years
> which is close to 235 lunations, except that over a period of 2500 years
> there are eight single-day jumps interposed. This is done to 'regularize'
> the date of Easter, the main aim of the Gregorian reform. The Gregorian
> is a luni-solar religious calendar, whereas the Western is a solar civil
> calendar. They are not the same thing.
>
> That is not to say that Lord Chesterfield's Act of 1751 did not address
> religious matters. It had to, because Great Britain (as it was then)
> is a religion-based nation. The monarch is the 'Defender of the Faith.'
> In this connection the Act contains several mistakes. For anti-Catholic
> and anti-Semitic reasons the phraseology employed (oft-quoted by people in
> some form : "Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after
> the
> equinox") is nonsensical in itself, and does not lead to the Easter dates
> actually printed in the Book of Common Prayer, the tables there following
> the Catholic rules. The statement cited there would imply that Easter
> cannot coincide with either an astronomical full moon or the Passover,
> whereas such coincidences do occur. I might note that the first person
> to have spelled out this nonsense, in about 1850, seems to have been
> Augustus De Morgan, one-time Secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society.
>
> On top of that - and this is significant - the Act mentions the desire
> to
> keep the solstices and equinox at the same seasonal dates. Leaving aside
> the recently-recognized fact that the seasons follow the anomalistic year,
> the implied necessary year-length for the calendar (the Western) as
> defined
> by that Act is the *tropical year* of 365.2422 days (on average, etc.).
> The 'Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac' (an official
> publication of the US & UK governments) actually mis-defines the tropical
> year as the time between vernal equinoxes, and it is NOT. Because of the
> eccentricity of our orbit four different-length years result from the
> times between vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and winter and summer
> solstices. The Gregorian reform was based upon regularizing Easter and
> thus keeping the date of the vernal equinox near-constant (which it fails
> to
> do; note the 53-hour range mentioned earlier), meaning that the year
> counted between those equinoxes is what is needed. This is 365.2424 days
> at present.
>
> This provides another reason why the Gregorian and Western calendars
> are not the same thing: their target year lengths are different. That
> difference in the fourth decimal place is significant. The mean
> Gregorian year of 365.2425 days is much closer to the Vernal Equinox
> year of 365.2424 days than the tropical year of 365.2422 days, as used
> in the Western calendar. Arguments over whether we need a 'correction'
> every 3200 or 4000 years, begun by astronomer John Herschel in 1828,
> are thus specious (and apart from anything else, tidal drag is
> lengthening the day as defined astronomically as opposed to
> atomically). The Catholic Church in the later sixteenth century would
> have produced a 'better' calendar if it had instead used a 33-year
> cycle containing eight leap years, as does the Persian calendar. This
> (i) Makes a year 365.242424... days long on average; (ii) Makes a cycle
> short enough to keep the equinox within a 24-hour range; (iii) Leads to
> a better solution of the lunar phase problem connected with Easter.
>
> There is more. The Eastern Orthodox Churches have suffered splits
> since in 1923 it was suggested that they alter from the Julian calendar
> to what has been called the 'Revised Julian'. This would have seven
> leap year days dropped from nine centuries, such that the year would
> average to 365.242222... days. This was to provide one-upmanship over
> the Gregorian scheme, but it is based on the mistaken belief that the
> *tropical year* rather than the *vernal equinox year* is the target.
> There are still arguments within those Churches on this topic, mostly
> based on a totally incorrect understanding of the astronomy.
>
> But this brings me full circle. So far as I am aware the only one of
> the Orthodox Churches to have adopted the Gregorian calendar is that of
> Finland. Thus it is true that the Gregorian calendar is used in
> Finland: within the Orthodox Church, and the Catholic Church. As for
> the rest of the country, that is a different matter. One would need to
> look at the Swedish legislation to see whether they adopted the
> Gregorian calendar, in a legal act dated (I would imagine) 1752, the
> year before the actual reform took place, although I am not sure
> whether Sweden was using the March 25th New Year as was Britain until
> 31st December 1751. I would imagine that the Lutherans of Sweden, like
> the Anglicans of Britain, would have written an Act which did not
> mention the Catholic Church/Pope etc., but rather defined a parallel
> solar calendar with some definition for when Easter is to be
> celebrated. Perhaps they made the same silly (and
> religiously-motivated) mistakes as did the British.
>
> It is very easy to make glib statements like "We use the Gregorian
> calendar" without realizing what is actually involved. For example,
> making January 1st the New Year's Day is often ascribed to the Gregorian
> reform, but that is a false belief. It was already in use before that.
> Off and on it has been used since at least 153 BC. Similarly we use
> calendar months which have been unaltered since 45 BC, notwithstanding
> claims that Augustus Caesar fiddled with them. Thus the months, as such,
> are not defined as part of the Gregorian calendar.
>
> Our year numbers are ordinals, not cardinals. Notwithstanding the fact
> that we count a 'zeroth law of thermodynamics', and a 'zeroth'
> Pharaonic dynasty in Egypt, it makes little sense to have a 'zeroth
> year'. AD 1 is 'the first year of the Lord'. (1 BC is the 'first year
> Before Christ', a seventeenth-century invention by an astronomer, by
> the way.) One may wonder how AD 1 can be 'the first year of the Lord'
> if he was born on December 25th (I am talking here about *traditional*
> dates rather than historically-veracious dates). When Dionysius
> Exiguus was setting up his framework for Easter dates in 525-253 (he
> was not trying to define an era) he correctly recognized that a Jewish
> boy's life is reckoned from his circumcision, not from birth. Thus
> Dionysius equated 1st January (in the year which two centuries later
> became labelled AD 1) as the date of the circumcision, it being the
> start of the year. (Look into a Church Missal and you will find January
> 1st named as the Feast of the Circumcision, and our method of counting
> years from that date is technically referred to as the *Stylo
> Circumcisionis*.) Circumcision occurs on the eighth day counting
> exclusively (see your Bible), putting the traditional Nativity on 25th
> December 1 BC, which was the traditional (but not actual, even then)
> date of the winter solstice festivities. (The early Church had actually
> used January 6th, Epiphany, to avoid the pagan solstice celebrations.)
> Dionysius then counted back the nine month gestation period to the
> traditional (but not actual) vernal equinox of March 25th in 1 BC, and
> he counted years from there as the *Anni ab Incarnatione*. This is the
> year which astronomers call 0 (using cardinals) but is more generally
> termed 1 BC (using ordinals). The fact that March 25th was the
> Incarnation/Annunciation/Lady Day was what led to the British and
> eventually American colonies using that date for New Year, although
> counted FROM THE WRONG YEAR! (AD 1 instead of 1 BC).
>
> I hope that the above is both of interest and illuminating. A final
> note for readers in the USA. Although you now use the Western calendar,
> and previous to 1752 the Julian was used in the Atlantic colonies, do
> not imagine that no use has ever been made of other systems. When the
> first Catholic missionaries arrived, they imposed the Gregorian
> calendar. Thus when (say) Texas and California joined the USA, although
> their dating systems may have been continuous they did move from the
> Gregorian to the Western calendar. Those parts in the Louisiana
> Purchase were on the Gregorian until they were administered for three
> weeks under the French Revolutionary Calendar in late 1803, before
> Napoleon sold the region to the USA. That's something to note next
> time you eat Lobster Thermidor in New Orleans.
>
> Until Alaska was sold in 1868 to the USA it was part of the Russian
> Empire, and thus on the Julian calendar. But it is more confusing than
> that.
> The day of the week there was different to that throughout the rest of
> North
> America. Although a change from Julian to Western (or Gregorian)
> calendar did not involve a change in the day of week sequence
> elsewhere, in Alaska it did because that region, in the absence of any
> International Date Line, used both the date and the day of the week
> appropriate for Moscow.
>
> [Deep breath]
>
>
>
> Sterling K. Webb
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rob Wesel" <rob at nakhladogmeteorites.com>
> To: "drtanuki" <drtanuki at yahoo.com>; <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2007 5:34 PM
> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] AD. Japan Meteorite
> Falls/Finds/Hammerspageupdated with more than 50 links
>
>
> I was just going over it Dirk, very cool
>
> Of note
>
> Nogata fell in the year 861 as you stated
> Look how well preserved this piece is 1146 years of curation
>
> I checked all sources and they confirm 861 as the fall date, some mention
> "Julian Calendar" in that date.
> As I can not find a plausible conversion of Julian 861 to Gregorian date
> (all converters lead me to a negative year) is this to mean that Julian
> dating was used to calculate the Gregorian date of 861?
>
> Damn that's old, predates them all and looks fresher than Mali
>
>
> Rob Wesel
> http://www.nakhladogmeteorites.com
> ------------------
> We are the music makers...
> and we are the dreamers of the dreams.
> Willy Wonka, 1971
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "drtanuki" <drtanuki at yahoo.com>
> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2007 3:07 PM
> Subject: [meteorite-list] AD. Japan Meteorite Falls/Finds/Hammers
> pageupdated with more than 50 links
>
>
>> Hi to all that are interested in Japanese meteorites I
>> have added more than 50 new links and four photos
>> (thanks to Paolo Gallo, Christian Anger, and Martin
>> Horesji). I hope that you find the webpage of
>> interest and use. Thank you.
>>
>> http://meteoritesjapan.com/japmets.aspx
>>
>>
>> Best Regards, Dirk Ross...Tokyo
>>
>> www.meteoritesjapan.com
>>
>
>
Received on Sun 18 Nov 2007 08:16:52 PM PST