happy makara sankranti, and astronomy misconceptions: Sankranti is not Uttarayana

jan 13th, 2012 CE

i wish all of you happy new year. i count the year from the makara sankranti. (there is also the kaliyuga year 5114 which will start with at ugadi if you so choose :-)

jan 14th is the makara sankranti and makara vilakku at sabarimala. 

it is the day the sun enters the constellation capricorn. (that is current and has always been correct).

it coincided with the winter solstice at some time in the past. but the precession of the equinoxes has meant that the two have not coincided for a long time. 

thus the makara sankranti and uttarayanam do not coincide. uttarayanam begins on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

the indian calendar was far superior to the western, julian calendar, which was hopelessly wrong. therefore jesuits in kerala circa 1400-1500 CE contacted the astronomers there to get corrections which helped them build the gregorian calendar. these jesuits are believed to have taken the manuscripts of the kerala school of astronomy and math which had the infinite series for trigonometric functions (so-called taylor and maclauren series really should be called the paramesvara and madhava series) to europe, which, alas, helped them navigate the open oceans! and oh, to lay the foundations for the calculus.

the writer of the frontline article that jayasree refers to must be -- what else could he be, if he gets to write in frontline -- a raving lunatic communist, for whom the only truth is what is written in mao's little green book.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: ram

Namaste Rajeev,

There have been many who claim Hindu astrologers are out of touch with
reality, therefore the Sankranti doesnt fall on Dec 21. Here is an
interesting article why they are wrong.

http://jayasreesaranathan.blogspot.com/2011/12/indian-astrology-is-more-scientific.html
--

Humanity travels not from error to truth, but from truth to truth; it
may be, if you like it better, from lower truth to higher truth, but
never from error to truth - Vivekananda