Starship Asterisk*

mexhunter wrote:
The great Elvis compile 76 years old today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callippic_cycle wrote:
<<In astronomy and calendar studies, the 76 year Callippic cycle is a particular approximate common multiple of the tropical year and the synodic month, that was proposed by Callippus in 330 BCE. A century before Callippus, Meton discovered the cycle of 19 years that counted 6,940 days, which exceeds 235 lunations by almost a third of a day, and 19 tropical years by four tenths of a day. It implicitly gave the solar year a length of 6940/19 = 365 + 1/4 + 1/76 days = 365 d 6 h 18 min 56 s. But Callippus knew that the length of the year was more closely 365 + 1/4 day (= 365d 6h 00m 00s), so he multiplied the 19-year cycle by 4 to reach an integer number of days, and then dropped 1 day from the last 19-year cycle. Thus he constructed a cycle of 76 years that contains 940 lunations and 27,759 days, and has been called the Callippic after him.

The first year of the first Callippic cycle began at the summer solstice of 330 BC (28 June in the proleptic Julian calendar), and was subsequently used by later astronomers. In Ptolemy's Almagest, for example, he cites observations by Timocharis in the 47th year of the first Callippic cycle (283 BC), when on the eighth of Anthesterion, the Pleiades were occulted by the Moon.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preseli_Hills wrote:
<<The Preseli Hills or Preseli Mountains (also spelt Presely) are a range of hills in north Pembrokeshire, Wales. The hills rise to 536 metres above sea level and are dotted with prehistoric remains including evidence of Neolithic settlement. In 1923, petrologist Herbert Henry Thomas identified that Bluestone from the hills corresponded to that used to build the inner circle of Stonehenge.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluestones wrote:
<<Preseli Bluestone tools, such as axes, have been discovered all over the British Isles. The bluestones at Stonehenge were placed there during the third phase of construction around 2300 BC. It is assumed that there were about 80 of them originally but only 43 remain. The stones weigh between 2 and 4 tons each. The majority of them are believed to have been brought from the Preseli Hills, about 250 miles away in Wales. If a glacier transported the stones, then it must have been the Irish Sea Glacier. Recently the archaeological find of the Boscombe Bowmen has been cited in support of the human transport theory. Preseli Bluestone dolerite axe heads have been found around the Preseli Hills as well, indicating that there was a population who knew how to work with the stones. There is also a legend of Merlin having miraculously transported the stones himself.>>