It’s Baktunalia! Astronomy VP Carolyn Sumners On Why Dec. 21 Is Trigger For Celebration, Not Wild Creativeness

When Plato got here around along with his principle that each one planets had round orbits, he challenged his college students and peers to reply the query of whether or not the planets all orbited on the same path or if they were orbiting separately. The primary one to tackle this was his scholar Eudoxus. His experiments proved that the solar had an ecliptic rotation sample. This threw into query most recognized and accepted “details” about the planets at the time.

Misplaced in all the apocalyptic discuss are the very important achievements of the Maya regarding each time-maintaining and astronomy. In the Burke Baker Planetarium, we’ve got a show called Mayan Prophecies that visits 4 traditional Maya cities (Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Tikal, and Palenque), as they’d have seemed over a thousand years ago. At Uxmal, we see a Maya astronomer watching the solar’s rays getting into the Temple of the Magician just two 20-day months before the sun would stand overhead and the rains would come. After this occasion, the astronomer might put together farmers to plant their corn and the king to plan festivals.

The Mayan people confirmed complex data of the skies and the movements of constellations and heavenly our bodies. The Mayan possess a singular relationship with the Sun and incorporated lots of their architectural buildings design with the Sun’s actions, explicit at its zenith during solstice. Speculation over the top of the Mayan calendar has result in widespread rumors and concern of a doomsday — so much in order that the U.S. government has posted a webpage concerning the situation on its usa.gov blog NASA additionally put up a webpage tackling Mayan calendar anxiousness.

However there may be one interesting astronomical alignment. On December 21, the sun will attain its lowest level within the sky for the Northern Hemisphere while it is in entrance of a dark rift within the Milky Way and straight between Earth and the Milky Approach Galaxy’s heart. This alignment has been in place for a number of years, but is often cited by the doomsday prophets. The black hole close to the galactic center has the same effect on us immediately because it does on any day.

We determined to take a look at how massive the room was,” explains Saturno. The crew burrowed North, searching for the rear wall of what they knew to be a small room, a room they decided would require minimal effort in the best way of excavation. The researchers reached the wall quickly; that they had been right about the measurement of the room. However what they found there no person could have anticipated. David Fong, an teacher at Olympic School, will talk about some spectacular astronomical events that can line up with the calendar, and Dec. 21.