<< Feature Articles >> The Great Stone Circles – How they Work Part 6a
Submitted by JACKME on Thursday, 07 July 2005 Page Views: 4115
Alternative Archaeology
The Moon Cycles
I am told that the moon moves to its extremes every 18.6 years and that 2005 is one of those years. If you miss seeing it this year you will have to wait for a long time, which is why I have decided to jump ahead to the cycles of the moon before finishing the sun movements.Prehistoric people were much more concerned with the moon cycles than we are today, and they invested a great deal of energy building moonrise and set indicators within the circles. They erected these stones to show the north/south change in azimuths (that is the bearing from True North at which the moon rises above the skyline) and, more surprisingly, either used existing skyline markers or built new ones at great effort. To top it all, they indicated where the moon rose and set at the extremes on a flat plain, even when there was never a hope of seeing it because of the hills!
Let us start with what we can all see from our houses, providing we are not in an over lit city with the view of the sky completely obliterated. It is much harder to observe the moon rises and sets due to the fact that half of them occur during daylight hours. Often they are obscured by a bright sun or even worse, by cloud cover.
After a few nights of watching, it will have been noticed that the moon’s shape alters from nothing to full and back again in just over 29 days, taking approximately a week (actually 7 days and 8 hours) on average to go through each quarter as it is called. The half moon shape is actually called the quarter. This is because of the time in the cycle, not the size of the moon itself. It should also be noted that the word ‘average’ always occurs with moon descriptions as it wobbles about a bit.
You will also have noticed that the moon’s rising and setting positions move gradually north or south each night in a cycle of approximately 27 days. At the same time it gets either higher or lower as it passes through the southern part of the sky. If you cannot see the skyline, find some method of measuring its elevation - I lie in bed and observe its position through the small panes of the window. This gives me with a very good idea of where it is in its cycle without much effort, and has the added bonus of being warm!
Most of the daily papers provide the forecast time of when the moon is likely to rise or set alongside the weather forecast. You will soon discover that if you live west of Greenwich it will be slightly later, and if you are looking over a skyline with an elevation above 0? it will be later still for the rising moon but earlier for the setting one.
During your period of observation, you will have noticed that when the moon is at the most northern end of its travels it gets later every night by as little as 8 minutes. As it moves south this time delay increases, until eventually at the southern extreme, which occurs every 18.6 years, it can be delayed by as much as up to 2 hours. The year 2005 is one of these years. This extreme is called a Major Standstill, because the moon appears to standstill several times during the year, both at the northern and southern extremes of risings and settings.
Over the nine-year period the length of the moon’s swings decreases, while the azimuth also diminishes to what is referred to as the Minor Standstill pictured here at Swinside . Both Major and Minor Standstills take their names from the fact that the moon appears to be in virtually the same place at the end of its travels on two consecutive rises and sets. It is fairly easy to fix these points, but once the moon has started to swing back it travels rapidly along the skyline. This can be up to 11? or more on successive nights especially when rising level with the Equinox.
These standstills occur about 10? either side of the sun’s solstice rises and sets. At Stonehenge it is considered that the postholes found in the area of the Heel Stone represent six 18.6-year observation cycles of the northern moonrise between the Major Standstill and the Minor Standstill, approximately 111 years in total. These are not quite in straight lines because the moon wobbles about and it is doubtful if the people in prehistory would have been able to assess accurately the exact maximum position reached in any year because of the changes in the weather affecting the refraction of light etc. It is also highly probable, as is often the case today, that there would have been cloud on some vital nights.
Some readers will know that the moon cycles affect the tides, both in their daily variations and their height. Every commercial port has its tide tables indicating when it is safe to enter and leave over the dock sill or the local bar.
In an attempt to try and understand this phenomena the azimuth of the rising moon, the moon phases, the daily time difference, and the tide heights were all plotted on to a single graph with a common date line. The azimuths, time differences and moon phases were taken from the computer program Redshift 3 and the tide heights came from the local tide tables, which also gave the moon phases. I am glad to say the moon phases from both sources agreed!
This graph was plotted for three months from the 9th November AD2004, from the 16th March AD2005 and finally, to see if there was any change in the pattern, for the 3rd month of 2005BC. The model was very similar in all three graphs, it being noted that the current dates are close to the Major Standstills while that in 2005BC was near to a Minor Standstill period.
The tides relative to the phases of the moon were fairly easy to see from the graph, with high tides occurring two or three days after either a full moon or no moon period. Obviously there were no tide tables available for the period 2005BC, but it would be a fair to guess that the same thing happened then.
You will have noticed that there are 3 different cycles of the moon:
1. Full moon to full moon in 29.3 days.
2. The north and south cycle every 27.5 days.
3. The north/south swings over a cycle of 18.6 years.
It must be noted that the full moon cycle and the north/south cycle are of differing lengths so the full moon does not occur at the same azimuth each lunar month and this period of 29.3 days does not divide nicely into the year of 365 days. It is hopelessly wrong therefore to talk about the Solstice or any other festival full moon happening on a given day, as this only happens very occasionally.
Muslims base their year on a cycle of 12 full moons, thus Ramadan moves 11 days earlier each year. The stones suggest that the ancient people may have counted forward 19 days, creating the Festival of the Returning Sun (FORS). Perhaps they had a long Yuletide holiday, more on this later.
Mental health troubles are often referred to as lunacy (from the Latin for moon – luna), which on the surface sounds a little far fetched, but some bright spark in the German police force realised that disturbance figures increased during the periods of the full moon. Thus they altered their shift patterns accordingly to cope with the extra workloads in these periods.
Next week I shall continue with the moon cycles and the northern rise at Swinside.
Contents page for the whole series is here
Note: This is the eighth of a series of previously unpublished articles by retired farmer, Jack Morris-Eyton.
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