The Ecliptic Calendar
http://www.EclipticCalendar.org
 
Composed by Damon Scott
with grateful acknowledgements to George Flory
for expert advice during its creation.

— © 2002 Damon Scott —

 

The Ecliptic Calendar is designed to be a beautiful way of marking time. The sensibility of the calendar is scientific and self-similar across the vastly different scales of time involved. Throughout the calendar, actual celestial motions, rather than counting schemes, determine when one duration ends and the next commences.

Time is marked into six scales:
 

Days are as usual, though in the strict definition days begin at 6:00 a.m. Local Solar Time rather than at midnight.

 

Months are named after the zodiacal constellation most prominent in the night-time sky that time of year. The lengths of the months wax and wane between 29 and 32 days due to the ellipticity of the Earth's orbit, and the two equinoxes and two solstices fall, without exception, on the first day of a month.

 

Years contain 12 months and always begin on the day of the Boreal Vernal Equinox, the first day of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere.

 

Saturnia contain between 29 and 30 years, the time for the planet Saturn to complete a full orbit. A new saturnium begins with the year in which Saturn (as viewed from the Sun) crosses the center of the Milky Way between Scorpio and Sagittarius.

 

Ages contain between 72 and 74 saturnia, or about 2,150 years. Though fully integrated with the rest of the Ecliptic Calendar, these ages are named and defined so as to continue the ancient usage of the “age” concept.

 

Cycles contain 12 ages and last about 25,800 years, the period of time for a full revolution of the Precession of the Equinoxes.

The new calendar is not intended to supplant the calendar currently in use for business transactions and dating newspapers. Instead, the Ecliptic Calendar should be attractive as a personal calendar to those who wish to mark time entirely by celestial motions. Historians and others, also, may find it useful to adopt the Ecliptic Calendar because of its advantage of marking large-scale time as thoughtfully as it marks out years and months.