Our Calendar: The Julian calendar and its errors. How corrected by the Gregorian. Rules for finding the dominical letter, and the day of the week of any event from the days of Julius Caesar 46 B.C. to the year of our Lord four thousand; a new and easy method of fixing the date of Easter. Hebrew calendar; showing the correspondence in the date of events recorded in the Bible with our present Gregorian calendar. Illustrated by valuable tables and charts.Packer, George Nichols
History
Our Calendar: The Julian calendar and its errors. How corrected by the Gregorian. Rules for finding the dominical letter, and the day of the week of any event from the days of Julius Caesar 46 B.C. to the year of our Lord four thousand; a new and easy method of fixing the date of Easter. Hebrew calendar; showing the correspondence in the date of events recorded in the Bible with our present Gregorian calendar. Illustrated by valuable tables and charts.
Packer, George Nichols
Calendar; Jewish calendar
Now, in this work, in fixing the date of Easter, we abandon the use of the
new moons altogether, and make calculations wholly from the paschal full
moons, which cannot happen earlier than the 21st of March, nor later than
the 19th of April. Appendix J. The epacts are here used to show the day of
the month on which the paschal full moons fall; that is, if the paschal
moon fall on a given day of the month in any year, it will happen eleven
days earlier the following year, and twenty-two days earlier the third
year, and so on. To illustrate, suppose the paschal moon fall on the 18th
of April in any given year, on the following year it would fall on the
7th, in the third year on the 27th of March; and in the fourth year the
moon would full on the 16th of March, but that would not be the paschal
moon, which cannot happen earlier than the 21st; so the following moon
would be the paschal moon, which happens thirty days later, or the 15th of
April; then the fifth year it would fall on the 4th of April, and so on.
The solar and lunar equations or corrections are not made by change of
epacts, for only one line of epacts is used in this work, but these
corrections are made by a change of the day of the month on which the
cycle commences. This change is made at the beginning of a century, and,
of course, does not occur but once in a hundred years, and frequently no
change is made for two, and even three hundred years. The reason for
making these changes has been given in the preceding chapter, (q. v.),
and will again be noticed in the proper place. The line of epacts used are
thus represented, commencing with a cipher as the point of departure: 0,
11, 22, 3, 14, 25, 6, 17, 28, 9, 20, 1, 12, 23, 4, 15, 26, 7, 18. It
should be borne in mind that the epacts are obtained by successively
adding eleven to the epact of the former year, and rejecting thirty as
often as the sum exceeds or equals that number. But, as the intercalary
month inserted at the end of the cycle contains only 29 days, add twelve
instead of eleven, to eighteen, the last of the cycle, and then reject
thirty as before; thus, 18 + 12 = 30; then 30 - 30 = 0. The cycle being
completed, we again commence with the cipher as the point of departure.
After having found the paschal full moons for one lunar cycle, a period of
nineteen years, then the paschal moons again occur in the same order, on
the same days of the month, as they did nineteen years before. Now, as has
also been shown in the preceding chapter, this cycle might have been
continued indefinitely had the Julian intercalation been followed without
correction, and the cycle been perfectly exact; but neither of these being
true, two equations or corrections must be made, one depending on the
error of the Julian calendar, which is called the solar-equation; the
other on the error of the lunar cycle, which is called the lunar equation.
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