Once in a blood moon occurrence

MANAGING EDITOR

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It’s not exactly unheard of to see your neighbors pulling lawn chairs out in their front yard when they know a lunar eclipse is coming.

There is always an air of excitement any time nature and the cosmos act in ways unusual to their daily — or nightly — routine.

Sunday night was no different as various Clovis and Portales residents could be seen sitting outside their house, checking out the unique but beautiful experience that is a lunar eclipse followed by what many like to call a “blood moon.”

According to themindunleashed.org, the lunar eclipses always happen at the full moon when the moon passes directly behind the Earth into its shadow, called the umbra. This can only happen during a full moon because the Earth, sun and moon must be aligned exactly, an occurrence known as syzygy.

But for John Hagee, a Christian evangelical minister from San Antonio, this past weekend’s lunar eclipse was a source of trepidation rather than excitement.

According to a recent livescience article by Elizabeth Palermo, Hagee contends that this past weekend's reddish moon was to bring about a world changing event.

Part of Hagee’s “blood moon prophecy” suggests that to solve the world's problems, God will destroy the world.

link Courtesy photo: Ronnie Cain

A full moon lunar eclipse took place Sunday night, causing what is called a “blood moon” or “harvest moon” when the moon goes behind the sun’s shadow. Some ancient civilizations feared lunar eclipses as a sign of death or the end of the world.

For Gary Zapotoczny, of the Clovis Astronomy Club, lunar and other astronomical events have been used by God as marking significant world events, but that does not necessarily mean they will all mark world-changing events.

“In my opinion, a lunar event is just another astronomical event. If it coincides with another thing going on in history, I’m not going to judge either way,” he said. “I believe as a Christian that it wouldn’t be the first time God has used the stars to indicate a significant event. You have three kings that were guided by a bright star to see the birth of Jesus.”

Zapotoczny, who watched the Sunday night lunar eclipse with his group at Ned Houk Park, said more than anything, what made this lunar eclipse so special is the fact that it “wasn’t just any blood moon.”

“This was the fourth blood moon in a two-year period,” he said. “Last night (Sunday) was rather spectacular, because we had a full lunar eclipse, and it was close enough to the Earth, that is was considered a super moon.”

Many ancient cultures agreed that lunar eclipses were cause for fear, according to an April 2014 National Geographic article by Jane Lee in which Lee quotes David Dearborn, a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

In the article, Dearborn highlighted an ancient myth with the Inca people about a jaguar that attacked and ate the moon, explaining the rusty or blood-red color that the moon often turned during a total lunar eclipse.

“The Inca feared that after it attacked the moon, the jaguar would crash to Earth to eat people,” Dearborn said in the article. “To prevent that, they would try to drive the predator away by shaking spears at the moon and making a lot of noise, including beating their dogs to make them howl and bark.”

The article said that according to Allen Kerkeslager, an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, superstitious beliefs and rare celestial events go hand in hand.

“When a rare phenomenon occurs, such as a blood moon total lunar eclipse, it's hard to resist what Kerkeslager calls the ‘evolutionary tendency to try to explain this as the result of some kind of intentional action by some personal agent,’” the article reads. “Humans' tendency to believe that everything has some kind of intention or purpose is one of the reasons humanity didn't die off long ago, according to cognitive scientists.”

The following is the history of astronomy in ancient cultures, according to nasa.gov:

Ancient China

By 2300 BC, ancient Chinese astrologers, already had sophisticated observatory buildings, and as early as 2650 BC, Li Shu was writing about astronomy. Observing total solar eclipses was a major element of forecasting the future health and successes of the Emperor.

By about 20 BC, surviving documents show that Chinese astrologers understood what caused eclipses, and by 8 BC some predictions of total solar eclipse were made using the 135-month recurrence period.

Babylon and Sumeria

Babylonian clay tablets which have survived since the dawn of civilization in the Mesopotamian region record the earliest total solar eclipse seen in Ugarit on May 3, 1375 BC.

Like the Chinese, Babylonian astrologers kept careful records about celestial happenings including the motions of Mercury, Venus, the Sun and the Moon on tablets dating from 1700 to 1681 BC.

Babylonian astronomers are credited with having discovered the 223-month period for lunar eclipses.

link Courtesy photo: Ronnie Cain

Ancient Egypt

Nearly all we know about ancient Egyptian civilization’s knowledge of astronomy comes from tomb paintings, various temple inscriptions and a handful of papyrus documents.

The fabulous astrological ceiling of Senmut painted around 1460 BC, includes celestial objects such as Orion, Sirius, and the planets Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn.

In 1100 BC Amenhope wrote “Catalog of the Universe” in which he identified the major known constellations.

Numerous temple and pyramid alignments and several papyrus codices suggest a sophisticated knowledge of trigonometry and algebra.

Ancient Greece

Before 450 BC, Meton realized that a single period of 235 lunar months (19 years) would cause the popular lunar calendar to return to synchrony with the solar, seasonal calendar.

Ptolemy (ca 150 AD) represents the epitome of knowledge of Grecian astronomy. Records such as the Almagest show he had a sophisticated scheme for predicting both lunar and solar eclipses. Ptolemy knew, for example, the details of the orbit of the Moon, including its nodal points. He also knew that the Sun must be within 20 degrees, 41 feet of the node point, and that up to two solar eclipses could occur within seven months in the same part of the world.

Ancient India

One Indian astronomy, Aryabhata of Kusumapura, born in AD 476, is the first known astronomer on that continent to have used a continuous system of counting solar days. His book, the “Aryabhatiya,” published in 498 AD, described numerical and geometric rules for eclipse calculations.

The Mayas

While Chinese, Babylonian, and Greek astronomers dominated the knowledge of old world astronomy, halfway across the globe, Mayan observers were working on calendars and recording celestial observations. The Dresden Codex records several tables thought to be lunar eclipse tables.

After the Spanish Conquistadores, came the missionaries in the 1600s who intentionally destroyed nearly all native written record. Little survives to tell us whether the Mayas, Incas or Aztecs achieved a deeper understanding of solar eclipses and their forecasting.

The Islamic World

Islamic astronomy became the western world’s powerhouse of scientific research during the 9th and 10th centuries AD, while the Dark Ages engulfed much of the rest of the western world.

Al-Khwarazmi developed the first tables trigonometric functions (ca 825 AD), which remained the standard reference well into the modern era. Al-Khwarazmi was known to the west as “Algorizm,” and this was the origin of the term “algorithm.”