Hasty Easter Sunday 2008

Hasty Easter Sunday 2008

Hasty Easter 95 years later / next = in 152 years

In 2008, Easter Sunday falls on a unusually early date, on March 23. The last time this happened was in 1913, that is to say 95 years before. And the next time Easter will be celebrating on March 23 will be in 2160, 152 years later. This scarcity is even more pronounced for the earliest possible Easter date, March 22. Thus, the last time Easter occurred on March 22 was in 1818 and the next time will be in 2285, that is 467 years later.

In fact, Easter never falls before March 22 and no later than April 25. Easter is celebrated mostly between 5 and April 16 and rarely 22 to March 25 or 23 to April 25. Recall that in the Gregorian calendar, Easter Sunday can fall as for 35 different dates, or between March 22 and April 25, with a frequency nearly constant between March 28 and April 20, about once every 30 years. (For more information, see Frequency of Occurrences of the Date of Easter over one 400 years Gregorian Cycle by Marcos Montes).

NOTE :
We refer here to the Catholic Easter date (Gregorian calendar / Western Easter), rather than Orthodox Easter (Julian calendar / Eastern Easter), which will fall instead on April 27, 2008.

Date of Easter - definition and problematic

Easter - general definition

Easter Sunday is the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a major event at the heart of Christianity and thus giving Easter the main place in the liturgical calendar.

Easter - ecclesiastical definition

The current ecclesiastical definition of the date of Easter is the one adopted by the Council of Nicaea. In the year 325, the Council of Nicaea, convened by the Roman Emperor Constantine, decreed the following rule for the date of Easter:
“Easter is celebrated on the Sunday following the fourteenth day of the Moon that reaches that age of 21 March or immediately thereafter”;
with the fourteenth day of the Moon being the day of the full moon and March 21 corresponding to the date of the spring equinox (or vernal equinox).

In detail, the ecclesiastical rules are:
a) Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on the day of the vernal equinox or shortly after;
b) the specific ecclesiastical full moon is the 14th day of tabular lunation (new moon);
c) the vernal equinox is fixed at March 21, so that Easter never falls before March 22 and no later than April 25.

In short, Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon of Spring; except that the full moon involved in this definition is not the astronomical Full Moon, but a ecclesiastical moon (defined in tables), which observes more or least parity with the astronomical moon. The ecclesiastical full moon may differ from the actual full moon by one or two days. The Church does not take into account actual movements of the moon. It uses rather its ecclesiastical moon, unreal but regular for the comput or calculation of the dates of mobile religious holidays. Let us note here that in the year 45 BC, when setting up the Julian calendar, its designer, the Egyptian astronomer Sosigene, estimated the date of the vernal equinox on March 25. However, the gap [of 0.0078 day] between the Julian year and the real solar year had slowly drift that date over the centuries. March 21 was the true date of the vernal equinox at the Council of Nicaea.

The vernal equinox is one of the periods of the year (with the autumnal equinox), where the length of the day is different from that of the night. This is because the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is an eclipse and not a circle. The law Kepler teaches that the Earth moves faster when it is closest to the Sun (around January 3), and more slowly if it is faraway (around July 4th). This uneven movement causes variations in the length of day and in the time of sunrise and sunset.

References

Easter Dates Calculators on the Web

  GM Arts Website
   http://users.sa.chariot.net.au/~gmarts/eastcalc.htm

  R. H. van Gent
   http://www.phys.uu.nl/~vgent/easter/eastercalculator.htm

  Church of Christ the King
   http://www.ctkchurch-school.org/ctkc2.htm

  JavaScript Form by Rick W. Koshko
   http://www.koshko.com/calendar/easter-js.shtml

  The Christian Calendar by Claus Tondering
   http://www.tondering.dk/claus/cal/node3.html

  Frequency of Occurrences of the Date of Easter over one 400 years Gregorian Cycle by Marcos Montes
   http://www.smart.net/~mmontes/freq2.html

Calculateurs des jours de Pâques
http://www.vendredi13.us/JourPaquesCalculs.html

Fréquence des dates de Pâques
http://www.vendredi13.us/FrequenceDatesPaques.html

Date de Pâques - définition et problématique
http://www.vendredi13.us/A5_fr.html

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