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Concept
Lunar calendar
Summary
A lunar calendar is a calendar based on the monthly cycles of the Moon's phases (synodic months, lunations), in contrast to solar calendars, whose annual cycles are based only directly on the solar year. The most widely observed purely lunar calendar is the Islamic calendar. A purely lunar calendar is distinguished from a lunisolar calendar, whose lunar months are brought into alignment with the solar year through some process of intercalation - such as by insertion of a leap month. The details of when months begin vary from calendar to calendar, with some using new, full, or crescent moons and others employing detailed calculations.
Since each lunation is approximately days, it is common for the months of a lunar calendar to alternate between 29 and 30 days. Since the period of 12 such lunations, a lunar year, is 354 days, 8 hours, 48 minutes, 34 seconds (354.36707 days), purely lunar calendars are 11 to 12 days shorter than the solar year. In purely lunar calendars, which do not make use of intercalation, the lunar months cycle through all the seasons of a solar year over the course of a 33–34 lunar-year cycle.
A lunisolar calendar was found at Warren Field in Scotland and has been dated to , during the Mesolithic period. Some scholars argue for lunar calendars still earlier—Rappenglück in the marks on a 17,000 year-old cave painting at Lascaux and Marshack in the marks on a 27,000 year-old bone baton—but their findings remain controversial. Scholars have argued that ancient hunters conducted regular astronomical observations of the Moon back in the Upper Palaeolithic. Samuel L. Macey dates the earliest uses of the Moon as a time-measuring device back to 28,000–30,000 years ago.
Lunar and lunisolar calendars differ as to which day is the first day of the month. Some are based on the first sighting of the lunar crescent, such as the Hijri calendar observed by most of Islam (and, historically, the Hebrew calendar). In some lunisolar calendars, such as the Chinese calendar, the first day of a month is the day when an astronomical new moon occurs in a particular time zone.
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