Wikipedia - It is good luck if a cuckoo is heard from the east or west.
These jaunts are called gökotta, or “early cuckoo morning”;Ascension Day 2012, May 17 is officially celebrated on a Thursday on the 40th day of Easter (or 39 days after Easter Sunday).
This is a rock that should be close to the heart of every reader of The Economist. For, just as nature abhors a vacuum, so science abhors a missed opportunity to give a name to something—and the name of asteroid 2901, proposed by a former science editor of this newspaper, is Bagehot. ftp://ftp.astro.com/pub/swisseph/programs
That a space rock is called after a Victorian journalist shows only that, no matter how meticulous and logical they are in their methods for making discoveries, scientists can be surprisingly whimsical when it comes to naming them. And not just whimsical. In fields from astronomy to zoology, names have as much to do with scoring political points, maintaining arcane traditions, settling scores, and making bad jokes as they do with labelling things in an unambiguous manner, which is supposedly their purpose.
In countries where it is a public holiday, Ascension Day is a free day for many workers.
Many people take a long weekend off because the day falls on a Thursday. The Friday in between is usually quiet, particularly in shops and offices. Despite Christianity being a minority religion in Indonesia, Ascension Day is a public holiday and special services take place at churches throughout the country.
Ascension Day is sometimes called Father’s Day in Germany because many Protestant men have herrenpartien “outings” on this day.
In Sweden many people go out to the woods at 3am or 4am to hear the birds at sunrise. It is good luck if a cuckoo is heard from the east or west.
These jaunts are called gökotta, or “early cuckoo morning”.
In countries where it is a public holiday, Ascension Day is a free day for many workers
In England, Ascension Day is associated with various water festivals ranging from Well Dressing in Derbyshire to the Planting of the “Penny Hedge” at Whitby, a small town in Yorkshire.
- Swiss Ephemeris contains three ephemerides. The user can choose whether he/she wants to use the original JPL DE406 data (if available at his/her site), the compressed Swiss Ephemeris data (the default) or a built in semianalytic theory by Steve Moshier. The Swiss Ephemeris package switches automatically to the available best precision ephemeris dependent on which installed ephemeris files it finds. Even without any stored ephemeris files, using the Moshier model, planetary positions with better than 0.1 seconds of arc precision are available (3 arcsec for the Moon). i
- In addition to the astronomical planets as contained in the JPL integration, we have included all other bodies and hypothetical factors which are of interest to the astrologer. We have used our own numerical integration program to provide ephemerides for ALL known asteroids. There are over 55'000 of them and nobody will be able to use them all. We distribute these extended asteroid files via our download area; there are also CDROMs available with large sets of asteroid files.
Asteroid reaserachers may be interested in a December 1998 article in the Economist magazine about the naming of asteroids. - Speed: The Swiss Ephemeris is precise and fast. On our Linux test machine, a 1000 MHz Pentium III, we compute 10'000 complete sets of planetary positions, i.e. 10'000 x 11 planets, in 9 seconds. This is 0.9 milliseconds for the complete set of exact planetary positions (consecutive 1 day steps).
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