Sun, moon and stars.

The plane of the lunar orbit is inclined to the ecliptic by 5.1°. The ecliptic (marked in red) is the apparent path of the Sun over a year - so it takes the sun one year to complete the circle. Meanwhile the moon follows a similar path, completing it in one month. Because the paths of the sun and moon are at an angle to each other, the moon crosses the path of the Sun twice every month. These points of crossing are called, lunar nodes, and they move gradually westward, performing a complete circle around the ecliptic in approximately 18.6 years - which is known as a  draconitic or nodical period. Why is it a Draconic cycle? There is an ancient idea of destruction and danger lurking in the sky. The older Egyptian Book of Gates, describes the solar journey through The Amduat. Every night the God Ra travels through the twelve gates to be rejuvenated and reborn. But the journey is always perilous and the Solar boat - the solar barque -  is in danger: Hour 7 : Regenerating t...

From Wiki: Uriel's Machine: The Prehistoric Technology That Survived the Flood is a best selling book published in 1999 by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas.The book's name is derived from a character of the same name in the Book of Enoch. In Knight and Lomas's interpretation of the Book of Enoch, Uriel warns Enoch about the impending flood, giving him instructions for building a form of solar observatory for the purpose of preserving advanced knowledge into a time of global disaster by teaching him the movement of the Sun against the horizon over a period of time, which Enoch then records in detail in the Book of the Courses of the Heavenly Luminaries. According to  Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, Uriel's machine is a 'horizon declinometer'. The fundamental premise is, an asteroid or comet approaching earth is more likely to hit us, if it is in the plane of the ecliptic. As the position of the sun, moon and planets show us where the ecliptic is, an U...

This morning the sun was eclipsed by the moon, which passed directly in front of the sun... Here at latitude 52, the sky did not become significantly darker; just  strange.  The light had an almost X ray quality to it. Colour was bleached out of the land, and shadows were more obvious and wrong. Even when 90% of the sun is covered by the moon, we don't get total darkness. The experience of a rapid onset of a night, a fall in temperature, silent birds and various optical illusions such as rainbow-tinted clouds and seeing clouds appearing to drop towards the earth at the time of maximum eclipse happened further north... The experience of a 90% eclipse is unsettling, but without welding glass I would not be able to see what was happening in the sky even if I squinted. I may have seen something biting the sun away if thin cloud had been in the way, But cloud is not a good or reliable filter. This means that even when a total eclipse happens -and they don't happen v...