Showing posts with label astronomical society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label astronomical society. Show all posts

Sunday, December 8, 2013

August 12th: Historic Astronomy

Take away the gnomon and use the center of its place as the center of a circle. Use string to attract a circle that will undergo the shadows. Discover the shortest shadow and observe the time. The shadow at photo voltaic noon ought to be the shortest. Whether it is winter, this shadow is pointing north. If it is summer time, the shadow is pointing south. To mark East and West, join the tip points of equal size shadows.


There is much debate about learn how to check with the Mayans. Traditionally, the word ‘Mayan’ only referred to the language, and ‘Maya’ was the noun and adjective used to describe the individuals and civilization. However, ‘Mayan’ is becoming extra widespread, and ‘Mayans’ is the plural type. This is precisely the same for many of the nice Mesoamerican civilizations: ‘Aztecs’ and ‘Olmecs’ have replaced ‘Aztec’ and ‘Olmec’ in language. Both usage appears to be perfectly fantastic, except among mental snobs! For more activities on creating the compass rose and finding the azimuth of the Solar’s location see Astronomy with a Stick at http://www.nsta.org/320/



With a pin or colored pencil, mark the approximate location of at present’s date. Then have students mark their birthday. Will the daylight hours be longer or shorter than at the moment on their birthday. Proceed to let college students find vital dates reminiscent of numerous holidays, parents’ birthdays, and so on. and analyze the place they fall on the analemma and the quantity of daylight. Ahau The numbers 1 by way of thirteen increased along with the days. So for examplethe first day within the cycle was 1 Imix, the second was 2 Ik, and so on.After 260 days, each mixture of identify and number (1-thirteen) would repeat.


In case you are affected by claims concerning the finish of the world in December 2012 predicted by Maya, you may loosen up. The oldest calendars of the lost pre-Columbian civilization that got here to mild by American archaeologists do not “conceive” something like this. Instead, they predict that the world will proceed its course untroubled for many thousands of years. Baktun 14, Baktun 15, Baktun sixteen had been all going to be coming,” mentioned Stuart. “The Maya calendar goes to maintain going, and hold going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the longer term. An enormous quantity that we can’t even wrap our heads around.”


The Mayan cycles were a bit extra advanced, such that every single day in a fifty two year period had a singular identify from acombination of assorted completely different cycles (just like the idea that there isa Monday 1st January only every 7 years or so). This fifty two yr cycle hasis referred to as a Calendar Round. To maintain track of dates on longer time scalesthe Mayans then had what’s often known as the Lengthy Depend, which provides aunique numerical indicator for each day.


Sunday, November 24, 2013

Visitor Speaker To Give Lecture On End Of World Theories

Equinoxes, solstices and eclipses have been a big a part of aboriginal astronomy. These ideas were scary to the early peoples who didn’t really understand why they were occurring. They didn’t understand that it was as simple as the sun, earth, and moon revolving and sometimes slipping into each other’s mild path. Nevertheless, many cultures additionally selected to have this stuff start their calendar years. As an illustration, Persian’s New Year is widely known. One of the most interesting historical myths is the parable that existed in Persepolis at the time.


Work are simply not prone to be found. They don’t protect effectively within the tropical Maya lowlands, unless you’ve got particular environmental circumstances,” says Saturno. “The truth that it was so properly preserved is fairly spectacular.” On this case, the Maya had fastidiously crammed in the room with a mix of stone, earth and ceramics earlier than sealing the door, quite than collapsing the roof and levelling from above,was customary when erecting new buildings. Will the world finish on twenty first December 2012 because of the end of the Mayan calendar or because the winter solstice is “aligned” with the Milky Manner?



Mayans tracked their creation tales in relation to the motion of the stars throughout the heavens. They believed that the point at which the Milky method appeared as a vertical band within the night time sky represented the moment of creation. The noses and mouths were systematically mutilated at one level. They might have been regarded as dwelling beings. It could have been a method to deactivate the constructing when another was built on high of it. The Sun Astronomical data key to Mayan calendar, which has gotten some attention recently due to doomsday warnings that it predicts the end of the world this December.


In Mayan hieroglyphics, land is depicted as a circle within a bigger plane. Sometimes condescending, modern archeologists counsel that this symbol is a flat-earth map. The empirical strategies of the Mayans, however, indicate in any other case, that the circle of land is a two-dimensional representation of our planet in area. From the standpoint of European theology, such a model of the Universe was intolerable. Members of the Mayan ethnics from Yucatan, Chiapas and Guatemala launched the web site “Living the Mayan time, sun, corn and Calendar”, which goals to supply teachers and highschool college students with content in Maya Astronomy and Arithmetic.


It was a mural of a Maya king, seated atop a throne. The mural is depicted here alongside a reconstruction by archaeological illustrator Heather Hurst. In line with Saturno, the painting has been colour matched to the chemical components of the pigments used by the original painter (determined utilizing a preservation technique often called chemical fluorescence), revealing the colour this painting would have been prior to enduring centuries of deterioration. However essentially the most striking discovery of all was made on the structure’s east wall, where Saturno and his team uncovered neatly ordered columns of rigorously rendered hieroglyphic texts and numerals.


Monday, October 21, 2013

Tales Of The Maya Skies

Astronomy in the Maya Codices is the first thorough treatise on the codices since Thompson’s A Commentary on the Dresden Codex four decades ago. The Brickers’ work is particular in that it offers a whole account of the historic background of scholarly inquiries into every of the instruments they take care of. The Brickers try to position every codical instrument in actual time, an approach they uniquely develop and absolutely justify. This work will remain the ‘last word’ on the function of astronomy in the codices and in Maya thought for a long time to return.”


Fibonacci numbers are used in the evaluation of financial markets, in methods equivalent to Fibonacci retracement, and are used in laptop algorithms such as the Fibonacci search approach and the Fibonacci heap knowledge structure. The straightforward recursion of Fibonacci numbers has additionally inspired a household of recursive graphs called Fibonacci cubes for interconnecting parallel and distributed methods. They also appear in organic settings,four similar to branching in bushes, association of leaves on a stem, the fruitlets of a pineapple,5 the flowering of artichoke, an uncurling fern and the association of a pine cone.



It’s tough to know exactly when the alleged Mayan doomsday prophecy drivel began. I’ve had an interest within the Mesoamerican cultures of Central America for many decades, so I was aware of their advanced calendar system. Nonetheless, in all my research of these cultures I by no means encountered any reference to a Mayan prophecy relating to the end of the world on December 21, 2012. Misinterpretation, lack of information of Mayan calendar reckoning, and downright falsehoods have conspired to feed the doomsday state of affairs. I swore to myself that I might not dignify any of the balderdash in my columns.


On condition that the lunar cycle is about twentynine and a 50 % days the Mayans are accountable for making the semiconcrete construction of time acknowledged to us as a month. The lunar scientific research performed in Mayan astronomy had been so in depth in actuality that accurate predictions for lunar eclipses have been made with constant good outcomes. This actually is much more exceptional enthusiastic about that civilizations even centuries in a while had been still crammed with awe and confusion over one thing these Mayans deemed enterprise as typical.


The Planets Will Not Align : Doomsday situations additionally declare that the planets will align and their tidal forces will trigger damaging earthquakes. A ebook known as The Jupiter Effect made similar claims in the nineteen seventies. There were no problems then either. Computing planetary positions on December 21, 2012 with a good planetarium, orephemeris program, shows that the planets may have completely different positions. They will not align. Even when they did, nevertheless, the tidal forces from the planets are more than from the galactic center, but nonetheless a lot lower than from the Solar andMoon. Will the world finish December 21, 2012? No!


Monday, August 5, 2013

Historical Maya Astronomy, Math And Mythology Defined! TALES OF THE MAYA SKIES Opens NOVEMBER 9 At The FLEET~New Digital Planetarium Present! — San Diego Science Alliance

The present fascination and confusion surrounding December 21, 2012 comes from a sequence of speculative and pseudo-scientific books within the 1970′s and 1980′s. Author John Major Jenkins packaged these mystical and probably hallucinogen-fueled speculations into his guide Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 , which among other issues stated the winter solstice will eclipse the middle of the galaxy on December 21, 2012 and the Solar will align with the galacticThese alignments, together with the alignment of the planets of our solar system, will trigger the dawn of a brand new age of hope and optimistic transformation for humanity.


Discuss Los Angeles’ location and have students determine when our days could be the longest based mostly on the analemma. Determine that date, June 21, because the summer season solstice. Have college students locate the autumn solstice. Have students mark these dates with a push pin or a colored pencil. Discover the equinoxes by finding the time when the Sun is straight over the equator. What number of hours of daylight are there on the equinox? Over seven million Maya currently dwell in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, the United States, and different countries all over the world.



Remove the gnomon and use the middle of its place as the middle of a circle. Use string to attract a circle that will go through the shadows. Discover the shortest shadow and notice the time. The shadow at solar midday must be the shortest. Whether it is winter, this shadow is pointing north. If it is summer season, the shadow is pointing south. Label this point on the shadow north and draw a straight line from it by means of the middle of the circle to the other side of the circle and label that time South. To mark East and West, join the top factors of equal size shadows.


In 1993, he revealed that he had come into contact with what he known as Telektonon, the “Talking Stone of Prophecy.” Telektonon purportedly revealed itself to Argüelles in a channeled message delivered by means of the stone “tube” that extends upstairs from the crypt of the famed seventh-century Mayan king Okay’inich Hanaab’ Pakal, in the Temple of the Inscriptions in Palenque, Mexico. (This curious archaeological function really exists.) Since then, Argüelles has acted as spokesperson for this ancient Mayan lord, proposing a global shift to a thirteen-month lunar calendar that he invented with the hope that it could carry humanity into nearer alignment with celestial rhythms.


These calendars ran concurrently and were meshed together by describing the date by the tzolk’in number and identify day, followed by the haab quantity and name day. This intermeshing gave another unit for measuring time, the calendar round, a fifty two-12 months cycle when the dates started repeating themselves (much as in the same manner that our Gregorian calendar repeats each 400 years, though there are other repeating cycles inside that). Mayan Codex ( Creative Commons ) Dec. 21 is the winter solstice,” he added. “And the winter solstice traces up with the constellation Sagittarius, and it’s form of pointing toward the center of the galaxy.”