The Astronomy of Easter
As this will be read before Easter, I thought it would be
interesting to look at the history of the most changeable
holiday of the year. Anyone who has raised children has likely
had to explain why Easter is not the same date or Sunday every
year. The easiest and most basic explanation is that Easter
falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the
first day of Spring (which is around the 21st of March).
Our universe is so immeasurable that our orderly calendars are
sadly inadequate for documenting vast quantities of time or
space; we often have to manufacture computations that make sense
to us. To further complicate things, Jesus was Jewish, and
Jewish tradition follows a lunar calendar. The Christian
calendar is a solar one. (Lunar calendars follow moon cycles,
which are shorter than sun cycles). Are we having fun yet? I
know I am.
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