Tonight the moon is one day short of first quarter. On Saturday, at one day past first quarter, it will be the ides of March.
In William Shakespeare's tragedy "Julius Caesar," the Roman statesman was warned to "beware the ides of March."
And, sure enough, it turned out to be a bad day for Caesar. He was assassinated on the ides of March 44 B.C.
Nicholas II, the last Russian czar, was forced to abdicate on the ides of March 1917, and, in 1972, there was an assassination attempt on George Wallace, governor of Alabama.
In modern times, the term ides of March has become a metaphor for impending doom. But the ides of March were nothing to fear in Caesar's day. The ides was simply a term the Romans used for the 15th day of March, May, July and October. It was the 13th day of the eight other months.
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The ides was originally meant to mark the full moon, but because the solar calendar months and lunar months are of different lengths, the original meaning was lost.
Julius Caesar's involvement with the calendar was noted in this column two weeks ago. He introduced the Julian Calendar in the Roman Empire in 46 B.C. This calendar set a standard year as 365 days, and it introduced the use of a leap year every four years.
This calendar was the standard in the Western world until the Gregorian calendar replaced it in the late 16th century.
On Saturday night, look at the bright, nine-day old moon and nearby red Mars. The moon has been relatively unchanged for billions of years, and the moon we see is the same moon seen by Julius Caesar. Did he imagine that one day spacecraft would send men to walk on its surface and return them safely to Earth?
The ides of March is important to astronomers for another reason. That's when Nicolas Louis de Lacaille was born in 1713. He's the man who mapped the constellations visible from the Southern Hemisphere.
