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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:
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Days
are as usual,
though in the strict definition days begin at 6:00 a.m.
Local Solar Time rather than at midnight.
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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.
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Years
contain 12 months
and always begin on the day of the Boreal Vernal Equinox,
the first day of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere.
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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.
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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.
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Cycles
contain 12 ages and last about 25,800 years,
the period of time for a full revolution of the Precession of the Equinoxes.
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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.
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