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Re: OT: Celestial maps

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Saturday, January 12, 2008, 19:24
On Jan 12, 2008 1:23 PM, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> On Jan 12, 2008 10:50 AM, Eugene Oh <un.doing@...> wrote: > > Is there a difference? I thought it'd be the same thing since > > technically 0 would be midnight of Jan 1, 1 CE.
Oh, and we're not talking about a point in time, but a year. The whole year before 1 CE is 0 CE (a.k.a. 1 BCE), from January 1st through December 31st. Exactly when that year was depends on what you're talking about. We currently use the Gregorian calendar, and sometimes astronomers extend it backwards well before its inception in 1582 to refer to past dates. But usually dates before then are given in the Julian calendar, which is also a case of extending it backward in time. It was established in 45 BCE, but there's uncertainty around how it lined up until around 8CE, due to an error in the original leap year rule and later correction. If you extend the Gregorian calendar backwards, the day that comes out as "January 1st, 0 CE" was a Saturday, 733,418 days or exactly 104,774 weeks ago today. If you extend the Julian calendar backwards instead, "January 1st, 0 CE" is the previous Thursday. In either case, the year that begins on that date is a leap year. if you go by the calendar actually in use in Rome at the time, well, obviously they wouldn't call the year 0 CE. :) But the year that corresponds to that, 753 AUC, according to the best scholarship available to us, was not a leap year, and began on the Friday in between the above two days. -- Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...>