"Naw-Ruz, the equinox and the astronomy of it all" by Kelly Snook OZ Whitehead Firesides

In this talk, Kelly Snook will provide a guided tour through the exquisite beauty of the Badí Calendar, which is followed by Baha'is around the world. She will explain in simple terms the daily, monthly, yearly, and even less frequent astronomical events that anchor the calendar to the physics of our local solar system. This Calendar, believed to be the first to be revealed by a Divine Messenger, was laid out by The Báb in the mid-19th Century and adopted fully by Baha'is worldwide in 2015. It is uniquely tied to both solar and lunar movements, such as the northern vernal equinox and new moon conjunction. Have you ever felt a little fuzzy on why the dates of the Gregorian calendar shift with respect to the dates of Baha'i Holy Days and other days of interest? Or what the equinox is and why it is a good marker of time? Or why the Lunar Calendar is so different from solar calendars like our modern standard calendar, which has leap years to stay aligned with the sun? Kelly hopes to make it all not just a little less confusing, but hopefully generate genuine appreciation for its beauty and perfection by bringing in the music of the spheres and demonstrating how the Calendar directly manifests God's principles of Oneness and Harmony.
Dr Kelly Snook was trained in Aeronautics and Astronautics, as well as in music. She is now creating a new field of research, called "Investigative Music" that is partially a return to Johannes Kepler's time, when music was used as one of the four tools for exploring the world. Arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music comprised the Quadrivium, the four modes of scientific inquiry. Before science as we knew it existed, these were the ways that the physical world was investigated. Arithmetic, the study of number; geometry, the study of number in space; music, the study of number in time; and astronomy, the study of number in space and time. When Johannes Kepler discovered his three laws of planetary motion, it was through the application of musical principles of harmony and spiritual principles of oneness that emerged the mathematical equations he will forever be famous for. Calendars are essentially the application of our astronomical understanding of space and time to the collective patterns of human activity. Kelly seeks to make audible and explorable these fundamental patterns in Nature.