On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 10:22 AM, Kim <kimharch@cut.net> wrote:
I have to share a bit of "history" that I saw on the History channel last night. The program was about Nostradamus and the so-called doomsday prophecies regarding December 12, 2012. The program claimed that on 12.21.12 the sun would become perfectly aligned with the galactic center as seen from Earth, and somehow this was predicted by Nostradamus and the Mayan calendar, among other sources. The program further claimed that this phenomenon was due to the precession of the equinoxes.
Here is an interesting page that seems to explain exactly what is meant by the solstice sun becoming "perfectly aligned" with the galactic plane. http://alignment2012.com/whatisga.htm Apparently the "perfect" alignment actually happened in 1998. This occurred when the sun, at the moment of the winter solstice, was aligned almost exactly on the galactic plane near Sagittarius from our point of view. The claim is that the Mayans calculated the precession of the earth's axis by measuring the precession of the equinoxes, and that they created a calendar with a long cycle to correspond to this precession. They calculated that the solstice sun would lie on the galactic plane in 2012. I have no idea if this claim about the Mayans is true. If it is true, the Mayans may have been a few years off (14 years or so), but I'm still pretty impressed. Of course, none of this has anything to do with volcanoes, asteroids, or mysterious galactic waves. All the hysteria is pure bunk. -- Michael W Thelen To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes