journey towards stars-7

Past episodes explained the fundamentals of calculating a planets position. Now let us navigate the different uses of the planetary positions. It is clear that the position of the planets is angular in nature and the linear velocity of the planets has no use for any purpose. One of the major uses of the planetary positions is the time reckoning. The reckoning of time with the help of the planetary positions on the zodiac has been explained here.
Now we become very familiar with the Gregorian calendar. Though we do not know the meanings and mechanism of the months like January, February etc we do follow them very perfectly. The main logic behind the number of the days in a particular month is missing for us. We do not know why February has 28 days; some other months have 30 days and some months have 31 days. Though the length of year has been taken from the revolutions of the earth, the division of the days in months in different ways looks meaningless. Till the middle of the 16th centaury we used to follow the juvellion calendar. Then Pope Gregory found that the mechanism of calculating the year is wrong and hence he made some correction to the calendar. He diluted the excess days of around 10 in that particular year and introduced the leap year system. That means this system of time reckoning is vulnerable to the interference of the human beings. After math of the Tsunami in 1994 there was news in "The times of India" which carried out some interesting science report. Some of the scientists found that the axis of the earth was affected or displaced by the tsunami stroke and hence the length of a year may go up to 370 days in the coming future. That means there are so many changes expected in the present calendar. The vulnerability of the calendar is due to the dependency of its computation on single fact, i.e., the revolution of the Earth and the calendar is called solar calendar.
Some countries follow the lunar calendars. Here, the dependence on the moon's movement make it de-linked from the nature. Nature has some particular properties and the changes in it happen in a cyclic movement. For example the seasons like winter, autumn, spring etc in the equatorial places like India move cyclically. So the calendar, along with the movements of the planets, if correlates with the nature or with the seasons as expressed then, it will be very useful and quite simple to follow them. But due to the short nature of the moon's revolutions no months of that calendar can represent the seasons of the nature in a static way. It's a major draw back with the lunar calendars which give no chance to correlate the time with the surroundings.

The above narration clearly expresses two things. The time reckoning system should have unique properties which can not be handled or altered by human beings and which are not vulnerable to the natural disasters like earth quakes, cyclones, tsunamis etc. At the same time that time may help human beings to correlate it with the surroundings. This interdependency of the time divisions and the ecosystem gave birth to a lot of eco-friendly customs which keep the culture of the land alive for ever. In the next episode we will cover the nature of that time and its relation with the surroundings and the eco system.

continues......

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