cure wrote:Full moon fell on June 21 in 1978.
Actually, there's a site where you can find all the moon phases in past and future years (they reach about to 1800 and I think that should be pretty much enough for most purposes).
I've tried to reconcile dates but eventuallly quit because it was too much trouble.
Look here:
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/MoonPhase.html
It is the easiest site I found for that. Unfortunately, you'll notice that a lunar cycle is about 29 days and not 28, which destroys my in-game use of 7 exact days for each phase.
Finally, I'd like to leave here a note regarding midsummer. John Mangrum did seem to use midsummer as somewhere between 21 June and 21 September, this is, summer as we use it.
But midsummer seems to be a quite English conception that probably comes from the Celtic Calendar, and remember this had four main festivals that broke the year in arguably four parts (though at times it appears they have only two seasons).
As such we could view
Summer as going from Beltaine to Lughnasad - 1st of May to 1st of August (I'm not sure about this day, but the month is August);
Fall from Lughnasad to Samhain - 1st November (the original Halloween)
Winter from Samhain to Imbolc - in February, same comment as for Lughnasad.
Spring from Imbolc to Beltaine.
Now, if you compute the midsummer and midwinter they will be more or less around the solstices, with about a week proximity.
That's, I think, where the midsummer conception of the solstice comes from.
Ail
So there you go.
