You see, part of A Night Borrowed takes place in present day in upstate New York, among other locales, and the reason that part of it is set in New York has to do with an article I read in a FATE Magazine compilation of articles called Out of Time and Place: Amazing accounts that challenge our view of human history. I bought the book on a whim at Barnes&Noble during one of my forays there. It was on clearance.
Anyway, in this book is an article about Druids in New York. The whole of that article is basically re-published here, but the following was the part that made me go, "Hmmm....":
In Fahnstock Park located bear Putnam Valley, New York are two chambers very close together. One chamber, the smaller one is oval and because there is a slab of rock near the back wall large enough to place a human body we named it the tomb. Out side this chamber is a large flat rock placed in the earth with carvings that clearly show an astronomical conjunction involving the crescent moon, and the planets Jupiter and Venus. It is possible that someone tried to make a record on when the chamber was built or perhaps the time it was used to place the body of a very important person. Using a planetarium program at the observatory in which I was a staff member at the time, I went back in time to find out when this particular alignment of the two planets and the moon took place. The dates I got were 1423 A.D, 1500 B.C and 2772 B.C.
But, actually, the guy was wrong about the alignments. Even after searching the whole of the year 1500BC, I wasn't able to find it, but I did find it happening on August 8, 1423. I took a screenshot of the event, which was more than just Venus, Jupiter, and the moon:
You can see where Mars was right there, too, as was Mercury, and even Saturn was in the Western sky at dusk that night. In fact (though I couldn't get a good screenshot of it), Uranus, which isn't visble with the naked eye, was lined up. After finding this, I went and looked all over around the year 1500BC, and didn't find anything, and I was starting to think, after three hours of doing this, that the 1423 alignment was a "one-off" phenomenon. But, out of curiousity and sense of thoroughness, I went and checked 2772BC. It didn't take me long to find this:
It would have happened below the horizon from a vantage in upstate New York, and about 4 in the morning. It would have been visible from South America. Anyways, in that shot, you can see that it is exactly the same alignment, just not visible from the ground. It's EXACTLY like the one I found in 1423.
So, I went back to 1500BC, looked some more, and came up empty. I decided - since the whole point of this was to see what the alignment looked like - since I couldn't find a picture of the inscription on the stone - and to find when (for my book's purposes) the alignment happened again. I started at 1423, and started going through the years, month-by-month. I found something similar in 1482:
... but it is not EXACTLY the same. I kept looking. I found another alignment that is exactly the same in 1626:
I don't remember where Mars was in that shot, but I think it was there, like in the 1423 one, just way far away, so it is exactly the same. Well, based on this information - that there was 203 years between the 1423 alignment and the 1626 alignment - I skipped 203 years ahead from 1626 to 1829. Nothing. Looked all around there. Nothing. Finally, I went back to the month-by-month examination, and, three hours later, found the alignment again - more to the south, this time, though - in 1837:
I don't remember where Mars was in that shot, but I think it was there, like in the 1423 one, just way far away, so it is exactly the same. Well, based on this information - that there was 203 years between the 1423 alignment and the 1626 alignment - I skipped 203 years ahead from 1626 to 1829. Nothing. Looked all around there. Nothing. Finally, I went back to the month-by-month examination, and, three hours later, found the alignment again - more to the south, this time, though - in 1837:
But the moon isn't quite right. It's in waxing crescent phase, but it is not aligned to make a triangle with Venus and Jupiter. It's close, though.
So, I went back 1626, and started going month-by-month again. I found another similar alignment - two hours later - in 1757:
The alignment of the moon is much closer to what I saw in the 1423 alignment the author of the article described, so I am torn as to which date is the correct one. I know that it happened on August 8, 1423, and again on September 23, 1626. The time between those two occurences is 203 years. If the 1757 alignment is the correct one, then the time between alignments is 131 years. If the 1837 alignment is the correct one, then the time elapsed is 211 years, which seems closer to me than the other.
Of course, there is nothing saying that it couldn't be BOTH dates, meaning that if the alignment happened in 1626, and then in 1757, and then again in 1837, the time between the last two I found is only 80 years.
Now, I am pretty sure that no one who reads A Night Borrowed is going to be as anal as I have been in figuring this shit out, but I want it to be as accurate as possible; however, for the purposes of the story, I am thinking that saying it happens about every 200 years would be logical. What do you think?
Today, I am going to see about making karaoke CDs for the karaoke people at the Stateline; they said they'll pay me $1 per song. And I am going to see when other planetary alignments took place. I am actually enjoying that. :)
