The 2014 Astro Calendar

ABOUT CALENDARS

The common theme of calendar making is the desire to organize units of time to satisfy the needs and preoccupations of society. In addition to serving practical purposes, the process of organization provides a sense, however illusory, of understanding and controlling time itself. Thus calendars serve as a link between mankind and the cosmos. It is little wonder that calendars have held a sacred status and have served as a source of social order and cultural identity. Calendars have provided the basis for planning agricultural, hunting, and migration cycles, for divination and prognostication, and for maintaining cycles of religious and civil events. Whatever their scientific sophistication, calendars must ultimately be judged as social contracts, not as scientific treatises.

Celestial bodies — the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars — have provided us a reference for measuring the passage of time throughout our existence. Ancient civilizations relied upon the apparent motion of these bodies through the sky to determine seasons, months, and years. There are "Man made" lunar calendars that some scientists place as old as 32,000 years. Some recent archeological findings are from the Ice Age where hunters carved notches and gouged holes into sticks, reindeer bones and the tusks of mammoths, depicting the days between each phase of the Moon. These artifacts are dated between 25,000 and 10,000 B.C. There are also surviving astronomical records inscribed on oracle bones dating back to the Shang dynasty of the fourteenth century B.C. that reveal a Chinese calendar, with intercalation of lunar months. We have no written records of Stonehenge, built over 4000 years ago in England, but its alignments show its purposes apparently included the determination of seasonal or celestial events, such as lunar eclipses, solstices and equinoxes.

The principal astronomical cycles are the day (based on the rotation of the Earth on its axis), the year (based on the revolution of the Earth around the Sun), and the month (based on the revolution of the Moon around the Earth). The complexity of calendars arises because these cycles of revolution do not comprise an integral number of days, and because astronomical cycles are neither constant nor perfectly commensurable with each other. A good site with examples to help us understand this complexity and lots of other interesting information is Mythical Ireland.

The Bahai Calendar year starts on 21 March and contains 365 or 366 days just as the Gregorian Calendar. Leap years are handled in just the same way. The year consists of 19 months each of 19 days. Month 18 is then followed by 4 or 5 intercalendary days which are given to feasting and present giving. The first day of each month is also a feast day. Days are considered to begin at sunset on the previous day. The fastest growing religion in the world , Bahá'í communities around the globe have been working to break down barriers of prejudice between peoples and have collaborated with other like-minded groups to promote a model of a global society.

The Buddhist calendar system is a lunar-based calendar, that measures time from the Paranibbana (Paranirvana) of the Buddha (that is, his death). Buddhists also have many local traditions and celebrations in various countries and ethnic groups. In most areas of the world, the holy days are synchronized with the phases of the moon.

The Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar based on calculations of the positions of the Sun and Moon. Months of 29 or 30 days begin on days of astronomical New Moons, with an intercalary month being added every two or three years.. There is no specific initial epoch for counting years. In historical records, dates were specified by counts of days and years in sexagenary cycles and by counts of years from a succession of eras established by reigning monarchs. The sixty-year cycle consists of a set of year names that are created by pairing a name from a list of ten Celestial Stems with a name from a list of twelve Terrestrial Branches, the Celestial Stems are specified by Chinese characters that have no English translation; the Terrestrial Branches are named after twelve animals. After six repetitions of the set of stems and five repetitions of the branches, a complete cycle of pairs is completed and a new cycle begins. Although the Gregorian calendar is used in the Peoples' Republic of China for administrative purposes, the traditional Chinese calendar is used for setting traditional festivals and for timing agricultural activities in the countryside. The Chinese calendar is also used by Chinese communities around the world.

The Gregorian calendar is a solar calendar designed to maintain synchrony with the tropical year. To do so, days are intercalated (forming leap years) to increase the average length of the calendar year. The Gregorian calendar today serves as an international standard for civil use. The ecclesiastical calendars of Christian churches are based on cycles of movable and immovable feasts. Christmas is the principal immovable feast, with its date set at December 25. Easter is the principal movable feast, and dates of most other movable feasts are determined with respect to Easter. However, the movable feasts of the Advent and Epiphany seasons are Sundays reckoned from Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany, respectively.

The Hindu Calendar plays an integral role in the lives of Hindus. Apart from measuring the traditional periods of time, it is also used to calculate the date of festivals, and auspicious times and days for performing ceremonies. As a result of a calendar reform in A.D. 1957, the National Calendar of India is a formalized lunisolar calendar in which leap years coincide with those of the Gregorian calendar (Calendar Reform Committee, 1957). Months are named after the traditional Indian months and are offset from the beginning of Gregorian months . In addition to establishing a civil calendar, the Calendar Reform Committee set guidelines for religious calendars, which require calculations of the motions of the Sun and Moon. Tabulations of the religious holidays are prepared by the India Meteorological Department and published annually in The Indian Astronomical Ephemeris. Despite the attempt to establish a unified calendar for all of India, many local variations exist. The Gregorian calendar continues in use for administrative purposes, and holidays are still determined according to regional, religious, and ethnic traditions .

The Islamic (Hijrah) calendar is based on the lunar cycle, but with 12 lunar months making up a year. This means that the calendar regresses over a period of 33 years. For religious purposes each month starts with the first visible appearance of the new moon but for civil purposes the calendar is based on calculated new moons. If there is poor visibility and the moon is not visible for several nights then a new month will always start no later than 30 days after the previous month started. All holidays begin at sundown on the evening before the date given. Islamic holidays are based on the lunar calendar and thus may vary by one or two days. A lunar calendar, such as the Islamic calendar, follows the lunar phase cycle without regard for the tropical year. Thus the months of the Islamic calendar systematically shift with respect to the months of the Gregorian calendar.

The Jewish calendar is a combined solar/lunar calendar, in that it strives to have its years coincide with the tropical year and its months coincide with the synodic months. This is a complicated goal, and the rules for the Jewish calendar are correspondingly fascinating. By tradition, days of the week are designated by number, with only the seventh day, Sabbath, having a specific name. Days are reckoned from sunset to sunset, so that day 1 begins at sunset on Saturday and ends at sunset on Sunday. The Sabbath begins at sunset on Friday and ends at sunset on Saturday. Each year consists of twelve or thirteen months, with months consisting of 29 or 30 days. An intercalary month is introduced in years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19 in a nineteen-year cycle of 235 lunations. The initial year of the calendar, A.M. (Anno Mundi) 1, is year 1 of the nineteen-year cycle. The calendar for a given year is established by determining the day of the week of Tishri 1 (first day of Rosh Hashanah or New Year's Day) and the number of days in the year. Years are classified according to the number of days in the year .

See also these sites Calendar Zone     Vedic Calendars     Earth Calendar   InterFaith Calendar