March 20: the sunnier half of the year begins, for Earth’s northern hemisphere. The Sun crosses the celestial equator into the northern half of the sky, at about 21h by Universal Time (5 or more hours earlier by American clocks)
Part of the chart of the Sun’s path, in Astronomical Calendar 2023
Department of corrections
A reader (Mark Lancaster) pointed out that a paragraph at the bottom right of page 115 of the Astronomical Calendar is defective. Indeed it is, in a strange way: the left side of it is cut off, even through the middle of letters. I discovered what had happened: the white background of the chart to the left had been stretched too far.
The system I was using for assembling the book is called Adobe InDesign, and only in it, I think, could this kind of quirk happen. The system has many subtleties, and many booby-traps, and the number and weirdness of the errors you introduce without noticing them is inversely proportional to the time you have spent learning the system.
I had noticed an error of a different kind in the Venus book. As a “filler” I had quoted a few lines from Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” including:
And tear our Pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the Iron gates of Life…
English now has the adjective thorough (“a thorough examination”) and the preposition through (“through the window”). They have a common origin, and in earlier times the preposition could take the two-syllable form, and did so in poetry to tinglingly good effect: in “The Ancient Mariner,”
At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came…
I’m not sure whether this preposition had the stress on the first syllable, like the adjective, or the second.
I knew perfectly well that the form used by Marvell was thorough. I must have copied from one of the online sources that give what they perhaps think is a corrected through. Unforgivable!
Goaded by this, I’ve re-started a page of corrigenda, where the correction to the Mars caption can be found.
__________
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Insert > special character > whatever!
Let’s get this straight, Bill and Guy:
Þurh (Old English) — through, thorough
burh (Old English) — borough, (Edin)boro’
No instances in metrical verse of boROUGH (iambic)
Therefore, unsurprisingly, none of thoROUGH (iambic)
— only THOrough (trochaic)
Thank you, Geoffrey. So the Marvell and Coleridge lines are instances of iambic meter in which the first iamb (ti-UM) is replaced by a trochee (UM-ti), as is done very often for metrical variety. That is certainly how I had been reading them.
How dud you manage to type the Old English letter Thorn (similar to a p)?
‘American clocks’ in the east say New York City but in Los Angeles it’d be a fair bit more than 5 hours.Then you have Hawaii and the Aleutian Archipelago which are politically integral parts of the USA but must abutt the International Date Line.
If I had written “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” the word through would be one syllable and accented.
That would have given Worsworth another reason to reject it from includion in “Lyrical Ballads”.
Spring has sprung!
The clouds mostly cleared this morning. At noon I could spend half an hour in the back yard in my shirt sleeves getting a noon sight with my sextant. Here at 122 degrees west longitude, local apparent noon was 2 hours 7 minutes before the moment of the equinox, and the Sun’s declination was 0 degrees 01.3 arcminutes south of the celestial equator. Made the math a little easier. I can’t see a true horizon from the back yard, so I use a bubble level on the sextant, which introduces an error of up to 12 arcminutes when measuring the height of the Sun. Today I calculated my latitude 6 nautical miles too far south, and my longitude 2 nautical miles too far east. Not bad. If you know your location on the open ocean within 6 nautical miles and you’ve got a good chart and a watchful lookout, you’ll probably be okay.
I took a short walk to be outside at the moment of the equinox and welcomed the Sun to the northern hemisphere.
All the blessings of the season to you Guy and to all your readers.
Clever-headed! In a previous incanation you were Eratosthenes.
Yes, the autumnal equinox occurred about 45 minutes ago. And bang on cue the cooler weather has arrived in Sydney.