Winter Nights New Year Oath - Determining Time From First Principles
2023-10-27 - [52] 8:11
This post is likely to be a bit scatterbrained... I apologize for that. I just want to get my New Year Oath out in the open before Winter Nights occurs.
I haven't been very closed off about being a Norse Heathen/Pagan, although I don't tend to be outspoken about it. With that said, Winter Nights is quickly approaching which is a few days/nights celebration of the Winter half of the year starting. This is considered by many Norse Heathens to be a New Year Celebration of sorts. In particular, Winter Nights starts during this Full Moon, which for a few reasons I consider to start just after sunset after this post gets published. Sure, that's a sunset too early, but Winter Nights is a 3 day celebration and the Full Moon tends to be mostly indistinguishable by the naked eye for about 3 nights, so I start the night that the Moon essentially appears full.
My Oath
I pledge to work on determining time from first principles. What does that mean?
- Determine Solar Noon (High Noon) from my location using physical objects I can create
- Determine where the night sky from my location rotates from
- Figure out how to determine when the Solstices are by the height of the Sun in the sky
- Attempt to figure out Solar Midnight after determining a Solar Noon
It feels a lot like cheating that I know that the Earth revolves around the Sun and that the North Star is pretty darn stable in the night sky in the Northern Hemisphere. With that said, I will actively attempt to determine the time without assuming there is any sort of relation between how the sky appears to rotate around the my location and how the Sun appears to rotate around the my location. As such, I plan to create the concept of a Sundial from scratch, without the assumption initially that Solar Noon can be determined by shadow length of a stylus pointed directly towards True North at the angle of Latitude.
Ending Thoughts
There is a calling within me to figure out time using only what nature can provide to me. I feel I need to determine time in many ways that those who came well before us figured out time and I feel I need to do this on my own.
I hope to post about my progress of "reinventing" time over the next 12 moons.
Again, sorry for how scatterbrained this post probably seems.