Predicting Weather By The Moon - Xavier University Libraries

Weather By The Moon
on a cycle of exactly 6,585.3 days. We can guess that the
cycles that were the most useful were those visible and
immediately relevant to daily life. The Maya tzolkin, or
260-day cycle, the most important time unit in the Mayan
calendar, was really the nine-Moon (265.7 day) interval
between human conception and birth.
Ptolemy and the Greeks knew that the Moon moves
around the Earth, but their faith in the purity of numbers,
and therefore in the staunch belief that orbits all had to be
circular, which symbolized perfection(thinking that God
would not have created otherwise) prevented them from
realising the true picture of Moon movement and caused a
period of intellectual stagnation on the subject for 1300
years. Copernicus, a Polish astronomer, published a book
in 1543, claiming that the Earth rotates on its axis, and,
with the other planets in the solar system, revolves around
the Sun. This was the birth of modern astronomy, yet even
he was stuck on the notion of perfectly circular otbits.
It was left to Johannes Kepler, whose first Law, published
in 1609, stated that the planets and Moon move
around the Sun in eclipses. His second Law, published in
the same year, stated that the speed of a planet around the
Sun depends on its distance. In other words, the nearer the
faster. Mercury, which is 36 million miles from the Sun,
moves much more quickly than Earth, at 93 million miles.
Mercury’s day is about 25 days long and its year 88 days..
The Moon, too, changes its speed as it comes nearer
to Earth and slows as it moves away, all in the space of a
month, with sometimes devastating climatic results to the
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