Missed my Solstice Observances

Gretna, Nebraska Ju-Ju Man

The Summer Solstice was late in the day yesterday, and my witch-doctor forgot to remind me. I had to find out from an old maid with a cat. I'll have to ask for a dispensation, or become a Druid, since they seem to be celebrating the first day of summer today. Ugh. I associate Druidism with bad teeth.

Winter Solstice

Click to see the day-night sine curve

Its the first day of Winter, the shortest day of the year. What a dull world it would be if there were no seasons.

I see this phenomenon as compelling evidence for the existence of a Creator. If you live in the USA, you are free to believe and say otherwise. Not so for most other folks on Earth. I'm not just referring to dogma-ridden theocracies and jack-boot dictatorships; even our "civilized" Canadian neighbors have no real freedom of thought or expression.

Equinox Perturbation Must Stop

Due for improvement?

The Vernal Equinox occurs today. It happens to fall on the same date as last year, but next year, autumn will begin a day earlier. Nobody likes uncertainty. One thing we Americans don't need is to have important dates on our calendars changing willy-nilly from year to year like Jewish holidays and Mohammedan spectacles. I propose legislation to regulate such floating observances as are not religious in nature. The Solstices and Equinoxes are secular designations based upon readily observable phenomena.

That these important dates don't fall on the same day every year is unacceptable. Call your Senators and Congresscats! Tell them you want a well-regulated calendar Americans can count on. Lets bring order back to our lives. Regular seasons for regular folks!

About perturbation of the equinoxes from Wikipedia*:

• The actual equinox is a single moment in time — it does not take the whole day.
• Because the Sun is a sphere and not a point source of light, the actual crossing of the Sun over the equator takes approximately 2 and 1/2 days. The equinox occurs halfway through the transit when the center of the Sun is directly over the equator.
• Disregarding atmospheric effect, that the Sun is not a point source of light and that the Earth's orbit is not perfectly circular, the equinox day will have 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of nighttime.
• At the Equinoxes, the rate of change for the length of daylight and nightime is the greatest. At the poles, the Equinox marks the transition from 24 hours of nightime to 24 hours of daylight. High in the Arctic Circle, Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway has an additional 15 minutes more daylight everyday around the time of the Spring equinox. Whereas, in Singapore, which lies virtually on the equator, the amount of daylight each day varies by just seconds.
• It is 94 days from the June solstice to the September equinox, but only 89 days from the December solstice to the March equinox. The seasons are not of equal length because of the variable speed the Earth has in its orbit around the Sun.
• The instances of the equinoxes are not fixed but fall about six hours later every year, amounting to one full day in four years, but then they are reset by the occurrence of a leap year. The Gregorian calendar is designed to follow the seasons as accurately as is practical. It is good, but not perfect. Also see: Gregorian calendar#Calendar seasonal error.
• Smaller irregularities in the times are caused by perturbations of the Moon and the other planets.
• Currently the most common equinox and solstice dates are 20 March, 21 June, 22 September and 21 December, the four year average will slowly shift to earlier times in the years to come. This shift is a full day in about 70 years (largely to be compensated by the century leap year rules of the Gregorian calendar). But that also means that as many years ago the dates of 21 March, 22 June, 23 September and 22 December were much more common, as older books teach and older people still remember.

This may all seem confusing, but we can't place all the blame on Pope Gregory XIII. Even the Chinese calendar, which owes nothing to the West, is full of nasty perturbations. The naysayers will try to tell you that the calendar we use is "good enough", but good enough for what? For the use of cats from the middle ages? Good enough for government work is more like it.
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** I don't think the Wiki weasels have twisted this entry. Unless they are from ESU#3 and think George Bush is responsible for sowing the seeds of confusion with his equinoctal perturbations.

Summer solstice brings out those wacky witches

GeoClock Software - Click for big

Yes sir, nothing like the longest day of the year to bring out the witches and shamans. They used to serve a purpose: their mysterious machinations put a stop to the days getting longer and longer forever. The ancient pagans must have thought that a catastrophic Global Warming was averted every year. By the same logic, my little beagle hound believed he chased the mailman away from the mail slot on the front door every day.

The racket of whipping the folks into a fear frenzy over an imagined impending doomsday, then earning a soft place in society by preventing it, is older than Al Gore. Like my dog thought he earned his keep by stopping the mailman from carrying out his nefarious scheme, modern day witch doctors will grow fat selling us wheezy cars and poison light bulbs.

Some folks, however, view the solstice as a time to take off their clothes in public and get down with some old-fashioned pagan revelry. Others are 'serious' about their paganist malarkey. From the Mercury News:

STONEHENGE, England—Thousands of modern-day druids, pagans and partygoers converged on Stonehenge early Thursday to cheer the dawn of the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere—the summer solstice.

Clad in antlers, black cloaks and oak leaves, a group gathered at the Heel stone—a twisted, pockmarked pillar at the edge of the prehistoric monument—to welcome the rising sun as revelers danced and yelled.

Jeanette Montesano, a 23-year-old recently graduated religion student from New York and a self-described pagan, said she had been saving for a year to make it to Stonehenge, comparing the importance of the trip to the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

"It's not the hajj, but it is 19,000 people in a little circle. I wanted to experience something like that."

Like the Mohammedan Hajj? Give me a break. You just want an excuse to disrobe in public. Not that there is anything wrong with that, of course.

Happy Vernal Equinox

Today, day and night are the same length. From now until Summer, the days get Longer. I don't celebrate this day like some folks, but I like to take note of it. If your family does something special for the Equinox, I hope you have more fun than Jeff Birch of Medford, Oregon. Says Jeff, he would:

"rather have a peaceful weekend at home" than attend his family's Vernal Equinox celebration on March 21. I realize it's supposed to be a festive time of conception and new growth in the womb of Mother Earth and all," Birch said. "But I just know that within an hour of arriving, things will get so bad that I'll be reverting to my 12-year-old self, hiding in the rec room downstairs, wearing my Iroquois false face mask and fingering my runes for comfort. It's not worth it."

Fingering his runes? This story smells funny.

18:22 Central Standard Time

Happy Solstice!

Autumnal Equinox

Nebra Skydisk

An important day since folks began looking at the sky. It is at 23:03 today here in Nebraska.

Solstice

The Solstice takes place tomorrow at 12:26 Universal Time. I'm taking the day off and going to town.

Spring is here

Sun Dagger: Native American (Anasazi) Solar Observatory

This year, the vernal equinox happens today at 18:29 Universal Time. It occurs at the same instant everywhere on earth. The days and nights are of exactly the same duration at the equinoxes, one of which marks the onset of Spring, the other the start of the Fall season. As the old feeder has noted in previous posts, the ability to predict and mark these season changes has been of great importance to human beings since man's bifurcated brain began to wonder what would happen mañana.

Pictured above is a view from inside an ancient solar observatory built by the Anasazi people in what is now Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. These folks used the arrangement of rocks relative to some petroglyphs to allow a sliver of light to point out the solstice and the equinox. Other examples of such ancient observatories are Stonehenge in England, and the so-called medicine wheels here in America. Whatever, Spring has sprung.

In other, less spring-like news, the feedlot is currently being inundated with a heavy wet snow. Here is what the forecasters at WOWT in Omaha (this link made the Drudge Report) predict for today:
On the plus side, we really need the moisture. And as folks in this part of the world are wont to say when hit with a big snow after the vernal equinox: "At least it won't last very long."
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Want to try balancing an egg on it's end today? Chances are, it will be just as easy to do it today as on any other day.

Happy Solstice

Winter Solstice 2005 - click for big

The technical Winter Solstice will 'happen' at about half past noon today, Central time. Compare the GeoClock image above to this Fall's Equinox here. What it really means is that we have just been through the longest night of the year. Today will be the shortest day. The Solstice and the Equinox were among the first important aspects of astronomy to be noted by our ancestors. They generally tracked the phenomena using rocks and their shadows, as at Stonehenge. The old feeder uses push-pins on the wall opposite an East-facing window to mark the rising sun. Before you call me a pagan, just remember that Christians observe the Winter Solstice as the symbolic birthday of Jesus. Here is a picture of this morning's sunrise at the Feedlot showing how I mark the seasons besides using GeoClock.

Fall Equinox is tomorrow

Day/Night as of today - Click for larger image

The Autumnal or Fall Equinox is tomorrow around supper time. I use GeoClock software, and it shows how the days and nights are the same length at the Equinox. Some say you can balance an egg on it's end on this day. I suspect there isn't anything to the egg business, but the Equinox , together with the Solstice, has a hoary tradition. Since humans became humans, and maybe before, these readily observable solar phenomena have been deemed important or auspicious.

Today, Wiccans and practitioners of other supposedly ancient belief systems, are about the only folks besides weather geeks who get a rise out of the Equinox. (Read what Wiccan blogger Andy has to say about it at Better Way.) We don't link to devil worshipers' blogs here at Plains Feeder, but I'm sure they are similarly excited .

The old feeder can't help but think that the incident of goat suckery near Omaha and noted yesterday in the post about El Chupacabras is connected to the Equinox. I don't know, but I wouldn't imagine that El Chupacabras of legend reads the calendar. That leaves human weirdos and space aliens to explain the caprine exsanguinations in Sarpy County. The Omaha metro has more weirdos than space aliens. I hope.

Chupacabras hits Omaha

TheOmahaChannel has this wonderful hometown story: Cult May Have Killed Goats. It seems the "goats were found Friday with all the blood drained from the animals near 71st Street and Cornhusker Road inside their regular pen. The goats were strangled and hog-tied."

The Nebraska Humane Society is investigating. If whoever did this is caught, they will get no mercy. The old feeder thinks maybe the perpetrators won't be caught. If they are, they might be only minions of still sicker benefactors.

There are practicing satanists and believers in santeria here in Nebraska. Some of the former are well placed in Omaha society. (For a hint, see The Johnny Gosch Blog.) The feeder would only be guessing in the case of santeria, but I believe either group could have done this.

Who knows, Maybe we have vampires? Nah. Too goth. It has to be the Chupacabras.
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Addendum:
WOWT has this: Tina Updegrove of the Nebraska Humane Society says,"On further inspection is when they found the holes in their jugular."

Maybe it is connected to the Equinox?