Descending and ascending

For Christians there is a short winter from today, Good Friday, to the day after tomorrow, Easter Sunday – from the crucifixion to the resurrection. And today the Moon happens to be at its descending node, sliding south through the ecliptic. A preacher hunting something new for a Good Friday sermon could make use of that.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

I’ve put my account of the interestingly tangled question of the date of Easter, with some graphics, into a page, added to the “Astronomical Miscellany” which you see in the menu at the top.

Like other pieces in the “Miscellany,” it may get improved in light of your comments.

Piero della Francesca painted the “Resurrection” as early as 1460. It is more than six and a half feet high, a freco, painted directly into the plaster ofa wall in a civic building in the small Tuscan town called San Sepolcro, “holy sepulchre,” because it possessed two supposed relics brought from the sepulchre at Jerusalem. Aldous Huxley in 1925 opined that this is “the greatest picture in the world.”

A thing I hadn’t known: when the Allied troops were advancing up Italy in 1944 and faced San Sepolcro, held by German troops, British artillery officer Tony Clarke was ordered to shell it; he had read Huxley’s essay, and instead ordered his gunners to hold fire. He was not court-martialled, and it was afterwards learned that bombardment would have been pointless because the Germans had already started retreating from the town.

A parallel story from two thousand years earlier, retold in an episode in my Berenice’s Hair, is that Demetrius “Poliorcetes,” the “city-besieger,” was about to set fire to a suburb of the city of Rhodes when delegates came out from it and told him that in it a deaf painter was still at work on a picture for the temple. Courteous Demetrius declared: “I would rather defile the tombs of my ancestors than molest the painter and his holy picture.”

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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.

ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image” or “Open image in new tab”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing  it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.  Or you can click ‘Refresh’ to get the latest version.