Happy New Year to those who follow the Malayalam calendar! And the Tamil calendar! And many others!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VishuVishu falls either on the same day or near April 14/15 as other new year...
Oh, this is interesting. Why April 14th? Because it's a sidereal calendar!
~1900 years ago the New Year was on the equinox, but the equinox has since moved three and a half weeks.
The Gregorian calendar is a tropical calendar, so it keeps in sync with the equinoxes, not with the zodiac and the fixed* stars, and that's why in that calendar, the zodiac has moved instead, and that's why your astrology friends say you're not born in the starsign you think you are.
TIL we have cultures with sidereal calendars.
* of course nothing is "fixed": they're very far away and slow in terms of angular velocity as seen from Earth
~1900 years ago the New Year was on the equinox, but the equinox has since moved three and a half weeks.
The Gregorian calendar is a tropical calendar, so it keeps in sync with the equinoxes, not with the zodiac and the fixed* stars, and that's why in that calendar, the zodiac has moved instead, and that's why your astrology friends say you're not born in the starsign you think you are.
TIL we have cultures with sidereal calendars.
* of course nothing is "fixed": they're very far away and slow in terms of angular velocity as seen from Earth
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