(03-24-2018, 01:19 PM)Ken S Wrote: Mark, looking at the sky, understanding the concept of an eighteen year lunar cycle is totally beyond my wildest imagination.
Well Ken, I can understand that. The vast majority of people, maybe close to 90% of the US population, normally see a very small fraction of the night sky.
I grew up on a ranch in the middle of nowhere. Literally. If you look at a map of the US at night, you will find a big dark spot encompassing Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming and South Dakota. I've spent most of my life right in the middle of it. There is no light pollution except the moon.
I remember family and friends coming to visit. Even friends from the tiny towns around the area were surprised how many stars there really are. People are always amazed by the simple lack of artificial light.
In fact, almost all people like light so much that they are almost always willing to trade sight for light. They will sit around a fire and stare right at it. When they look away from the fire they can't see anything, so they go back to watching the fire.
It's really fun and easy to scare the hell out of people when they're night blind. Watching a fire is exactly as entertaining as watching the pot boiling above it, compared to what else you can normally see at night.
My childhood heroes were my older cousins, and we were together for a few weeks every summer. We spent lots of nights under the bright stars of the constellations. The frapillion stars of the milky way shed enough light for our young eyes to allow us to play on moonless nights.
Our Mothers easily passed simple astronomy down to us. It was up to us to figure out more, and the most obvious things were the Super bright "stars", and their strange motions. One was regular size, but very bright. One was bigger, and red. Two were just the biggest and brightest stars, but it was interesting that each summer was different.
I think about how that could have panned out 100,000 years ago. Our family members are mostly night owls, a strong hereditary trait. So in our tribe, our family was particularly interested in the night sky. The names of the stars and the shapes of the constelations were handed down through several generations. Much sooner than later, patterns would emerge, and new family members would be born when the stars happened to be thus and so, and that would make things easy to remember. Then a friend in our tribe would have a baby, so the mother would ask Mom how the stars were...
There you have it. The simple science of astronomy, the most interesting aspect of night. From that, astrology is born from generations of simple astronomy. Something greater than ourselves to believe in is one of humanity's core ingredients.
All ancient civilizations happen to come up with the same numbers because astronomy is exceedingly precise. It took a really long time to simplify it.
