Every so often, while Googling, I stumble across something that for some reason grabs my attention and interest to a degree that goes beyond reason.
The Saros Cycle is one of those things that I discovered today.
Not being an astronomer, astrophysicist, etc. I find this particular concept almost totally useless to me, but for some reason I’m captivated by the idea of calculating lunar eclipses over a period of 1280 years…
I don’t know why.
Share your wierd and unreasonable interests recently discovered.
TVGuy, things like this make life interesting, don’t they? I love learning new things, especially when they are weird and unreasonable. I’d never heard of the Saros Cycle before. Very interesting.
I have, in the last few months, been driven to distraction by the construction of high-rise buildings.
From not caring that they were there, to sitting idly watching the skyline, and trying to find out every facet of their construction. It’s driving my wife crazy. She thought it was bad when I was just a computer nerd…
Oi, that happens to me too Khadro. I never used to care, but after seeing some new buildings being completed right around me, I became obsessed with watching their day-to-day progression.
There are a host of astronomical cycles that are relatively unknown. Some have surprised me, like the Milankovitch Cycle. I don’t know how likely it is to be correct, but it’s something to think about.
I remember reading about those Milankovitch cycles in a book which posed an even stranger theory: that the Earth’s entire crust undergoes a periodic (and catastophic) shift relative to the main body of the planet. I think this was alleged to happen about every 30,000 years, and the stresses of the Milankovitch cycles were supposed to help cause it.
Thus, according to these people, part of the reason for ice ages was that different areas of the Earth moved into the arctic and antarctic circles at different times. I believe they claimed that Hudson Bay sat right on the north pole during the last ice age.
