Whats the difference between calendar based on the moon from today's calendar?

Answer 1

Calendars based on the Moon have the advantage of a very clear beginning to the month - New Moon. You can always guess the date - 1st for new moon crescent, about the 7th for half moon (D in the northern hemisphere), 15th for full moon, 21st for the other half moon(C) and 29th for the C shaped crescent. You do not have to keep a careful note of the days. The problem is that a lunar month is 29.5 days so after 12 months, only 354 days have gone by. So the seasons, which are based on the Sun, slip around your calendar and any festival you assign to a month as, say, a spring festival, slips deeper into winter, then autumn and so on. Not to mention the small fact that new moon is not always the beginning of a day, although this makes only a small difference. So the Jewish calender has leap years when a extra month is added in to bring the months back into line with the seasons and smaller corrections are made by choosing the number of days in certain months to be either 29 or 30. The Gregorian calender used in the West, is based on counting 365 days in a year. That is pretty accurate, it actually takes 365 .24 days to go around the sun so we simply add in an extra day every 4 years. That is good enough for about 100 years so a second adjust is made by not adding the day on the turn of the century. This still leaves one question. Having got a system pretty wel linked to the sun, why not start it on, say, Winter Solstice, the shortest day, December 21st.? Why wait till 11 days later?

Answer 2

A calendar based on the moon, like the lunar calendar, uses the phases of the moon to track time, typically consisting of 12 months based on the moon's cycle. Today's calendar, the Gregorian calendar, is a solar calendar based on the position of the Earth in relation to the sun and consists of 12 months with varying days. The main difference is in the way time is measured and organized, with the lunar calendar focused on lunar phases and the Gregorian calendar focusing on Earth's position in the solar system.