If the Sun steps here

It occurred to me, while I was watching Sisyphus roll his boulder, the Sun, up the hill of the ecliptic through February into March, that on that slope I could mark annual events such as holidays, a.k.a. festivals. They are tied to positions in our solar calendar, even though for many of them those positions are determined by the Moon as well as the Sun.

So here is how the Sun chart in Astronomical Calendar 2024 could have looked.

– with some dates that fall in the southerly half of the Sun’s year: Ash Wednesday (which is the day after tomorrow), the first day of Ramadan, and Rosh Hashanah (Jewish new year). In 2025 they will be at different dates: March 5, March 1, and September 22.

There are of course many other annual events. They can be divided into several kinds according to the way they have to be calculated: fixed days in the year (such as Christmas); the “weekday in month” type (such as Thanksgiving and the clock-changing dates); Easter and those that are determined by its date (such as Ash Wednesday); days in other calendars, such as the Jewish and Muslim.

I at first thought of including many kinds in the chart, color-coded as to their kinds – gray for fixed dates, green for Muslim? But that makes crowing and overlapping.

You would scarcely believe – I can scarcely believe  – the intricacy of the programming it took to add this seemingly simple feature to the chart – mainly because I insisted on breaking the labels for the names of the events into two if they consist of more than one word, and positioning them on the other side of the ecliptic if there is more space there, as in the other half of the Sun chart.

The most powerful word in the programming language, perhaps in any language – the word that has most consequences – is IF.

I think I read that there is a sort of purist version of Fortran called IfTran, in which “go to” statements are avoid and all branching in the program is handled by “if” statements.

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