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The Night Sky Podcast | The Chinese New Year
Hello, and thank you for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast. My name is Billy Newman. And I’m Marina Hansen. And thank you for listening to this week’s episode. We’re going to be talking a little bit. I think we’re going to dig in a little deeper this week into the Chinese New Year.
Yeah. Chinese New Year was on Monday, the eighth of this month, I believe.
Yeah. So starts Monday, the eighth of this of this month in 2016. And it’s a year the monkey this year, that’s my year. Little Marina. Yeah, that’s pretty cool. I was been ADA. And that was, I think, the Year of the Dragon. Hey, that’s cool. Pretty cool one. And I think there’s like a handful of another what we just named two of them. So another 10 animals that are in the Chinese zodiac, but we’ll get to the Chinese zodiac stuff in a minute. But what’s cool, though, so like last year, the Chinese New Year wasn’t until almost the end of February. And so it’s weird that it’s like on a different date. Right? Yeah. And so I had this, I added, because I really don’t know much about the Chinese New Year other than that it is celebrated. And that it seems to be January or February, most every year, it’s about what I know. But it’s different than our calendar, right. So we’re trying to dig into that more and figure out how the Chinese had had sort of developed this calendar. And that really broke out into a big rat hole of how every culture in the last couple 1000 years has tried to figure out their calendar and calendar stuff is really pretty interesting. It’s a lot to do with how early astronomers started to structure the math around the rhythm of the Earth and the Moon and how it how it goes around the sun, what our what our cycle is, and ended up being pretty important for how they sort of set up and start their calendars.
And yeah, it’s really interesting. There are a ton of different calendars systems.
Yeah, every culture had one, there’s a lot of information that seems to be shared between them. We’ll try and get into a couple of them, I think. So for like the Chinese New Year. So this year, it’s on the eighth. That’s because it was a new moon on the eighth. And so what that indicates is that the Chinese calendar is a lunar calendar, it’s set up on the lunar new year. But further more than that, is that it’s not really a lunar calendar, because that has some specific things to it, too. And so the Chinese calendar adapts itself to stay on track with the year by adding leap months in so that makes it a Luna solar calendar. Right? Yeah, we’re sad. It’s complicated. So there’s lunar calendars. There’s Luna solar calendars. And then there are solar calendars. So I guess to start from a frame of reference that we both understand being Westerners. We’re currently on the seven day a week for a gorian calendar. And I think that was established by Pope Gregory in like the late 1400s, or 1500s. And that was to replace the very similar Julian calendar. Did you look that one up at all? Yeah, Julian calendar. Yeah. And so that was around during the time of the Romans, right, it was introduced when Julius Caesar was in pallet power. So as the Julian calendar, it’s a really accurate calendar, it really in a lot of ways, they’re, they’re all super accurate. But the problem with all of them is that they’re off. Or a lot of these ancient calendars were off by a few minutes, or even like part of a day or so. And so over years, and years and years, that would add up to like, I think over like, you know, 236 years, that would be one day off. And then over millennia, that’d be a week off, and then two weeks off, and, you know, so they’d have these problems where they would kind of get off in their time. And I think the problem with the Julian calendar was that it wouldn’t predict the onset of Easter correctly. Right? I think so. Yeah. And so that was like a big, a big part of it, as they think as they tried to match. Well, after the Christian conversion was like Constantinople, then Europe was predominantly Catholic and, or, you know, a Christian religion. So I think that like was a period of, let’s see, ad 1002 ad 1500, before the Gregorian calendar was introduced, there was kind of the shift so that like, Easter would be falling in early March, which was like before, the equinox, or, or at least the dates would match up so that it would be like early March when the equinox had already passed. So this was all set up to make a correction to this. So the Gregorian calendars were introduced the Leap Year, or the leap day that we have in February, I’m pretty sure that’s what I understand. Yeah. And so that’s kind of our system for it. So in the Chinese system, what they have is a lunisolar calendar, where it starts. Let’s see how I can best explain it. There’s,
I was gonna ask, how does that fit into the equinox cycle? The Chinese calendar,
yeah. So there’s the winter solstice, which is real close to our new year, right, so December 21, we have the winter solstice. And then in March, we have the spring equinox. And then there are a couple full moons that fall in between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, probably three, sometimes four of them, I think, depending on the cycle, that’s the tricky thing about the Luna Sol or the lunar system. And so the way that they set up their Lunar New Year is that it’s the, it’s the new moon that falls in between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. And so it’s like the middle cycle that the moon has the start of the middle cycle. So So I guess for us this year. Let’s see since it was, what, 30 days before the eighth that they had the last New Moon. So there’s a new moon in like, early January, after the solstice. So that’d be the first new moon. Okay, and then this is the second full moon. And then in early March, you’re going to get another form or another new moon, and then we’re going to have the equinox. And so this one’s kind of the middle lunar cycle between Solstice and equinox. Okay. And that’s the date that they set for the Lunar New Year. Okay. Yeah, so that’s kind of, I think that’s what’s the really interesting part of it is, is that they set it up at that time. And so the way that they have is that it’s kind of a progression of like, weekly cycles. So there’s a lot more important to put on, put on the position of the moon in the sky. Now, if you follow a lunar year 12 lunar cycles, or you know, like a whole lunar year, I think is like 354 or 355 days. Right. So this is off from our solar cycle. And so the reason that the Chinese have a lunar solar calendar is because every few years in their period, they would add a whole extra month, it would be a long year, so it’d be a 13 month, year or a 12 month year.
Do they have a name for that 13th month?
I think it’s, well, our modern position for it is an inter killary or an enter an intercalary. Leap month is sorted. So that’s when they pull on a 13 month, I don’t know if if the Chinese stuff that I’ve gone into, at least describes like what that next month would be called yet though. But it seems like there is this connection in the Chinese culture to sort of break things down into two week periods. That base it’s a different way to like start from everything that you know, when you’re trying to think about how a different culture than are sort of set up their calendar system, like what kind of events are important to them, like how the how nature reacts around them, I think like in our system in North America, we have a lot of stuff based around the Four Seasons that we get. But in tropical areas, they don’t really experience as many seasons. So they wouldn’t really break things out in that same way. Even though that really doesn’t change what a year cycle is, it kind of does for them, like when they start the year when they end the year. What element is, is the thing that kind of like inspires them to bring on the start of their new cycle. It’s kind of interesting stuff. So in the Chinese system, we start in February, a lot of the time, I think it’s the time between January 21 and February 20. But if the new moon will not fall between that time period, that’s when a leap month will be added to push to push that date down a little bit. So that it kind of changes the calendar. Super. It’s so confusing,
but it’s, it’s Yeah, it’s a lot to keep track of. So what is what is the cycle called that the Chinese calendar is based on? or which one of those cycles is it?
Well, so the Chinese calendars is a lunar calendar. And then there’s, there’s this other thing that was found later on, so we have the Gregorian or let’s start with what a real year is. So there’s a few different terms for it, there’s like a sidereal year and a synaptic year. Let’s talk about those two for a second. So there’s a sidereal year which is the time it takes for the sun to go or for us to go around the Sun completely and for our from our position from our perspective to observe the sun in the exact same position again a year later. And so what that ends up being mathematically is 365 days and like one quarter day, so it’s like a little bit different and even down to that there’s there’s more I guess depth to it. There’s more specifics about like what make an absolute day which is catches such hours just super crazy stuff, like how specific it is. So I said, Dear you’ll month, let’s say for what would that be for the moon to go from? Well, I don’t wanna get ahead of myself. I sidereal year is 365 days and one quarter, day and 178 Today after that, so it’s like, I don’t know 360 5.4 or something is what it ends up being. That’s why we end up having a leap year every few years to sort of fill in that extra day that sort of built up over time. And that’s what kind of keeps us on track. So that are yours are yours in the solar calendar don’t really get out of line. That’s what helps keep the solstice on the same day of the year in every cycle, and equinoxes on the same time periods of every cycle. So there is a real year it is specifically 360 5.4. But then there’s this weird point where the lunar calendar were these lunar cycles were a sidereal lunar year or a lunar. I guess for us, it would be the lunar cycle. A sidereal lunar cycle is like 27 days. But that’s not full moon, the full moon. That’s the complicated thing about the lunar system is, it’s so confusing. So as the month moves on, so like two weeks from now, the sun is going to be in a bit of a different location than when it is in the sky right now, just as we see, the planets kind of move against the stars, or there’s the stars themselves sort of transition themselves westward across the sky over the season, then that means that that’s kind of those stars are moving past the sun also. And so in a month from now, when we come up to another new moon, the sun is going to be in a new constellation. But a sidereal month marks when the moon arrives back into that same position against the stars behind it, as that makes it less time because the sun is moved on. And so that makes it another day or day and a half for the moon to move up to where the sun is now in its new position in the sky, to make it a synoptic month, which is the point of new moon to New Moon. And that’s the period that’s 29 point, point eight days, or 29 and a half days.
And that’s the moon moving from its point around and then back to its same point where it is in the stars.
That would be a sidereal month. But yeah, so same point. So let’s say like back in November, Scorpio was the constellation that the sun would have been in during that time. But then, later in December a month after that, when the new moon came around again, the sun would now be in Sagittarius. Okay, right. And so for the point, it would take 27 and some amount of days for the moon to go from its background position of the stars in Scorpio to again, its background position in the stars against Scorpio. But now that the sun has left Scorpio and is in Sagittarius, it’s going to take that extra period of time for the moon, like another day for the moon to write for them and to move through that in space along the ecliptic to the position where the sun now would rest in Sagittarius. Okay, gosh, I hope that barely makes sense. It’s so complicated. This is like all this complicated cycling stuff that they try to figure out back in the past. So the reason that I explained those two things is that there’s this 355 day lunar year, that’s sort of set up on the 12 lunar cycles of 29 days towards like 28 or 29 days, depending on I think whatever they pick at the time, but But yeah, there’s like a 29 day lunar cycle. So that gets you around. And then Gosh, it’s just so it’s, it’s too complicated. But then there’s this period called the metonic cycle. That’s the big one. So that’s what reconciles our solar year with the lunar year. And so that is every 19 years. There’s, I guess this metonic cycle is what it’s called it was this metonic cycle was identified, I think by a Greek mathematician and astronomer called Matan in 330 BC. And that’s like, that’s like Alexander the Great period. It’s way back. It’s so strange. I’ve been trying to like match up all these other historical events with astronomical discoveries. Really interesting stuff. So the lunar cycle ends up being reconciled with the solar cycle in this, this thing called the metonic cycle, which is 19 years long. And that’s an indicator of when the new moons are going to occur. So you notice how when, let’s say, like, a few days ago, we had a new moon on the eighth, and it’ll be another 19 years before we get back in the position where we predict that the new moon then again on the eighth, okay? So it’s it’s kind of the system is figuring out what it is, but what it really means is that it’s, I think, a total of 235 lunations, or new moon to New Moon periods, and it’s almost exactly 19 solar years, two to the second or, you know, two To like a really like small number. And so because those two numbers match up because it’s a it’s a common multiple of the lunar month system and the solar year system, it’s what’s able to reconcile and prove that our day, or excuse me, our year, our total orbit around the Sun is 365.4 days. Wow, that’s interesting. Yeah, it’s pretty, it’s pretty crazy. Yeah, that is so. So we talked a little bit about the Chinese. Well, about the Chinese zodiac at the beginning of the year, the monkey I was in 1988 was the Year of the Dragon, right. And then there’s like a whole search set of other animals that are in that, but those are based on the years, right, it’s not based on the months. And so our understanding of the zodiac in the West is that it’s based on the month that you were born, this is all astrology, but there’s also a lot of skywatching astronomy information encoded in it. So what we find out in the Chinese New Year is that really, that is not as strong of a tie to the stars as well, we have in the West, the 12 symbols that they have for their years for their Chinese zodiac don’t relate to the Zodiac stars, the constellations along the ecliptic that we recognize. And I think, I think Zodiac comes from what I was reading Zodiac comes from the Greek word of a circle of animals, which is strange, because the Greek Zodiac includes Gemini and Libra and other stuff that’s not animals. Yeah.
Yeah, so. So there’s that. So there’s that too, that was kind of funny. But in China, all of their zodiac signs do do match that I think Zodiac was just sort of stolen word. That’s sort of how we recognize it to be. But what I was looking at more is that there was this other idea that the Chinese had, and it was called the 28 mansions. And so instead of 12, instead of 12 structured constellations that we have along the ecliptic, there were I think, 28 of them. And I think that these were broken out into this other more complicated set of star charts. The Chinese had names and stuff and different positions, like they had this whole like, I think was like a kingdom for like, the season. Like there was like a summer fall winter spring section of the sky, and it was sort of all this constellation. Like, I think there’s one that was like a dragon like a big dragon. Do you know I’m talking like, or, um, I think it’s like the summer said, I think instead of interpreting Scorpio and the southern sky in the summer, as being a scorpion, I think they called it a dragon. And it was it was the end of Scorpio, the curve and the tail of the constellation of Scorpio all the way out to the west, in through Libra, and then into Virgo where spika is. So I think like spika, to Antares and then down to the tail, almost up to Sagittarius, that was all one constellation that identified probably summer or something like that sort of what a figure, but it was the dragon. And so spiker was the horn, on the head of the dragon, and then Scorpios part of the body and that stretched out. And then there’s the tail, like the scorpion Stinger that we see that we recognize. And that was like, the dragon, I think was part of the idea. kind of fun. But, but I’m still kind of trying to reconcile this part of it, though, is that there, there was also this breakdown of 28 different positions or constellations of the stars, that there would be but what I’m kind of trying to figure out now is, given that there’s 28 of them. And given that we just talked about how the moon as this 29 day, synoptic month, and one of those days, is the day that the moon is going to be in the position of the sun. Well, I don’t know, that’d be there must have been like some kind of stretch between that. But what it seems to me like is that each one of these mansions is a position for each day of the moon cycle across the night sky and into the morning sky. Right. Yeah, the 20 the 28 days that it moves through, yeah, the 28 days. And so I think that, that part of that is sort of the understanding of the 28 mansions. This is probably conjecture on my part, I didn’t read this in one of the sources that I was looking at, but I’m just trying to do the division of the culture putting an importance on 28. And then that also kind of showing up between the Synoptic synoptic and sidereal months of the the cycle of the moon that we’re looking at. I think that’s kind of important to it.
Yeah, that’s really interesting. It seems like there. There’s something there are some connection.
It does seem like that when I was looking at it a little more, it seemed like yeah, they broke them up into smaller constellations. There’s a list of the constellations online, you can see what they are. If you understand Chinese better than I could or pronunciations of Chinese words, you might be able to read through them more clearly than I could.
I was gonna ask how many there anyway, the constellations.
See, that’s what I’m not sure about. And I think some of those records were lost. There, they had, I think they might have had maybe less structured or less apps. to loot positions of the sky then what the Greek mythology that we sort of learned is now. And so I think they were a little bit more flexible. Like where they could say this large region is this symbol, but also included in this really large region is this small thing that is also identified. Does that makes sense? Right? Yeah. Cuz they had like the Pleiades identified? Sure. Yeah. So you could say the Pleiades would be a small thing, but then they could say, maybe that whole quadrant of the sky was a bird. Sure, you know, or it was like this, like a or like the dragon is really big area, but I think it also included like six or seven mansions of these 28 mansions that the moon would pass through on you know, during its its route across the ecliptic, and the night sky. Okay, yeah. So strange.
Yeah, I want to learn more about those mansions. Oh, that’s really interesting. That’s broken up into 28. Like that. And those seams.
Yeah, it’s really weird, man. And so I think that that goes back to about 2500 bc in China, which is super long ago. So the Chinese calendar, I think now marks, like 4713 years, instead of our 2016 years, because they didn’t have that conversion of the BC to AD. You know, when we changed our 2000 years ago, yeah. And I don’t know exactly when the calendar change ever took place. I’m not sure how that culturally was for the people in the Roman Empire to understand, I just don’t know when that came about, if when they decided they were going to start the years over again, that might be newer than that, or, you know, it might be something that they kind of decided 100 200 years later, that kind of goes over our heads because I don’t think they had a stopwatch on its use zero, guys, here we go. So I wonder what kind of calendar systems they kept before that, you know, as they track the passions of yours, and then how we converted that into the countdown to the before Christ, you know, like 31 bc to zero BC, and then to plus 34 ad, like, it’s just kind of complicated how all that comes together, which is really interesting, and will also kind of brings up those symmetric calendars. So I was looking this up too. So there’s the Hebrew calendar, and that’s a lunisolar calendar, which matches really similar to the Chinese calendar. And so like a lot of the Jewish holidays are matched up to the lunar calendar, or these lunar synoptic cycles. And so I think like, that’s where we get, like Easter from, that’s based on a lunar solar calendar, like, it’s like the first the first full moon after the equinox starts the period. So it’s what is it the first Sunday, after the Good Friday, the follows the new moon, after the equinox, right? Yeah, there you go. And so the Hebrew culture had a lunar solar calendar, but the Islamic culture had a lunar calendar, I think even in parts of it, it’s still used. So a lot of the Islamic holidays or the Muslim holidays are all associated on the lunar calendar. And that’s why they move around. Like that’s why we see Ramadan in different positions in our calendar year, every year, because it’s holiday date is based on this lunar calendar. And since it’s not a lunar solar calendar, since it’s not correcting the cycle, based on the sidereal position of the earth, every, you know, 365.4 days, it’s running on a 355 or 54 day calendar, then it kind of rotates, right, like, because there’s that gap that that remainder that’s leftover in those two calendar systems. That’s why our calendar, it’s going to drop back, or it’s going to be on a different date position throughout the year. That’s why it never seemed like something that we can really keep track of like, I always wonder I don’t understand when that happening at all.
That’s really interesting. Yeah, so the, the Islamic calendar is winter. The Chinese calendar is lunisolar. Yeah. And the Gregorian calendar, which is our calendar, or the western calendar that you mentioned earlier, that’s solar calendar, right?
I think, yeah, that’s gonna be a solar calendar.
And the solar calendar is just a measure of the earth. The
sidereal year or the tropical year was another name I’d heard for it. Oh, yeah. Tell me about the tropical the tropical year I think is I think it essentially finds the same number as the sidereal year but it’s just a little bit off it’s really strange. there’s a there’s a few of these cycles that are all super super close together, but then they’re just they’re just barely like, an hour or two apart a year. Right. But that turns out to be a ton per millennium. It’s like It’s like a few days or like a week or something every 200 years you know, it’s it’s a weird difference happens. So tropical year I think is supposed to be almost based on the Same way as sidereal year set, but it’s supposed to be within the tropics of the United States or within the tropics of the world. So within like the 20 degrees north, 20 degrees south, and I think it’s supposed to be the sidereal position of like a star rising along the ecliptic to the point again, when that would come up, again. So like, there’s like these viewing holes that have been put together in the past, where it’s like, it’s like a big rock stone. And when you’re in the structure, kind of like Stonehenge almost, when you physically look at a spot at a certain date on sunrise or sunset, let’s say there’s a star, or there’s some marker that’s coming up. And like this, this rock setup is constructed so that it sort of physically maps the cosmos or, you know, like the calendar system out before you as you look at it, like in Egypt, they had this self cific calendar, this this was based on Sirius, so they follow the star series was the brightest star in the night sky that would come up for them. And I guess what they would do is, they would track that the date that it would be in conjunction with the sun, I’m pretty sure. Let’s see, the weird thing is the C Series is not on the ecliptic. So it’s never really going to be an absolute conjunction with the sun, it’s just going to be in the same position of the sky. But what we notice is that’s not in the wintertime for us that’s almost closer to the summer solstice than it is to the winter solstice. And what it would do is it would often correspond with the flooding of the Nile that would happen, I guess, I don’t know how that works like it must have been and of springtime, but they’re in kind of a tropical area too. And so their seasonal recognition would be a lot different than ours is they might have things like I recall Chile fruiting all the time, because it’s warmer, you know, as where we would have pretty four distinct seasons. Yeah, autumn, winter, spring summer as like being pretty distinct positions. But for them, I think it might have just been like rainy and dry, or, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah. And so it seems like they I think they broke it up into three, it was like before, before the rains or anything was like the rains, the harvest, and the time between or something was kind of how I set up. But I think they would follow the star series. But the strange thing about series is that since it’s not on the ecliptic, it doesn’t always give an accurate day, it is just a little bit off if you can, it is an absolute calendar. Whereas stars that are on the ecliptic better at like the equitorial line above us like Antares or all Tiburon or maybe spika, I think is really close to like anything that’s within five degrees of the ecliptic line, wherever that Moon is going to pass the moon in the sun are going to pass, those are going to be the most accurate measures of something like this. And so since the Egyptian sticks, something that was off like that was south of the ecliptic line, their year ended up being off it ended up being different and I think there’s some other thing called this. So thick cycle. That’s like 1400 years is supposed to reconcile the solar year with the sidereal year of serious. That’s pretty complicated. So strange. Yeah, that’s how complicated figuring out how long a year is, is. And that’ll wrap up just about everything we have to talk about this week about calendars and the night sky above us on behalf of Marina Hanson. My name is Billy Newman and thank you for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast.