I was a little slow to catch on to the interesting point that Fischer is alluding to:owlice wrote:Last time I checked, a day was still 24 hours, and 15 was still less than 24.Daniel Fischer wrote:"There IS a lunar eclipse on the solstice. That is a true statement around the world." Actually it's a wrong statement everywhere because the difference in time is 15 hours, more than half a day! It's one of those moderately rare cases where both events happen within a 24-hour period, which means that for some timezones it's on the same calendar day.
When the December 21, at 08:17 am UTC total eclipse takes place it will still be December 20th in Hawaii & Alaska.
When the December 21, at 23:38 pm UTC solstice takes place it will be December 22th for half of the globe.
So what does APOD's "A Lunar Eclipse on Solstice Day" really mean?
Should it really have been: "A Lunar Eclipse on Solstice Day for many"
or: "A Lunar Eclipse within 24 hours of Solstice" (my preference)
I wonder if the winter solstice of 1387 actually took place during the lunar eclipse
rather than simply within 24 hours (or on the same day for parts of the northern hemisphere).
(The NASA eclipse website is swamped so will have to figure this all out later.)
Fischer is talking about APOD being to parochial.owlice wrote:Where, please, did I load "it" up with numerology, meaningless or otherwise?Daniel Fischer wrote:
Which happens to be the area of the world where the eclipse is seen best, i.e. in a dark sky: So go observe the nice show and stop loading it with largely meaningless numerology (I even saw a Canadian paper interview a witch about that - no kidding)!
This is the first post in which I've mentioned or referred to any numbers at all.