YOUNG PEOPLE, DID YOU KNOW?
Since this week the problem of the contest will concern ASTRONOMY, we will benefit from the circumstance to treat of this subject here.
I
Astronomy is the oldest of sciences from its beginnings and for long centuries, it was dependent on the beliefs and to the religious practices, in the same way it was mingled a long time closely with astrology, of which it... did not come to disentangle definitively that there are two or three centuries.
2
The Earth is one of the nine planets which "turns" around the Sun, accompanied themselves by smaller bodies, the satellites, of which the Moon is an example. The planets and their satellites shine only because they reflects the sunlight the planets are: Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, the ninth was discovered in 1930.
3
Even the Sun itself is a star. It is only because it is much closer to us that it seems enormously more luminous to us and larger than all other stars than we see the evening in the sky. However the Sun is one of the smallest stars, among the billions of billions which forms a Galaxy.
4
From antiquity, one took the practice to group stars in figures symbolic systems or constellations, whose names were generally those of the heroes or the animals of mythology. The Zodiac is a band of the celestial "sphere" which extends to: 8° on both sides of the ecliptic and crosses 13 constellations (and not 12), they are the signs of the zodiac. The name of the 13 signs is: Aquarius, (1), Pisces (2), Aries (3), Taurus (4), Gemini (5), Cancer (6), Leo (7), Virgo (8), Libra (9), Scorpio (10), Ophiuchus (11), Sagittarius (12), Capricorn (13). At present the signs do not occupy any more the place that one gives them "officially", because of the precession of the equinoxes of which the period is of: 25,807 years, in theory: 26,000 years.
Armand DEFAGO
Editor’s Note: The above is from the magazine Circuit #8 page 4, which is dated 22 July 1956. This is of course the feast day of Saint Mary Magdalene, and suggests a predilection of the Priory for this saint at least 6 years before the 1962 publication of Robert Charroux’s Trésors du monde which initially brought the story of Saunière’s treasure to national attention.
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