Junda Stormscale
The Junda Stormscale is a historic calendar used by the inhabitants of the Junda Isles from around 3000 BME until the third century ME.
This is in a series of articles about calendarsplugin-autotooltip__small plugin-autotooltip_bigCalendars
Many different calendars have been used during Helevos' long history. Most societies used individual calendars starting either with their founding, or from some religious or political event. This made comparative history a confusing subject, particularly with the passage of time. and dating systems.
The Junda were considered a simple tribal people living on a remote group of islands, yet despite their seeming lack of sophistication they developed a complex mathematical system. Their annual calendar was based on the storm tides, which occur when the planet is in conjunction with the giant planet Kwato’orplugin-autotooltip__small plugin-autotooltip_bigKwato'or
Kwato’or (KWAT-oh-oor) is the six planet of Cordes in the Cronox System.
It is a gas supergiant, violent and beautiful, with titanic eternal storm systems coloured white and all shades from pale lilac to deep purple. It is a true giant, approximately 2.4 Jovian masses, so big that it causes the. The conjunction happens every every 546.74 days, or 1.32 solar years. Since this was such an important annual event, the Junda measured years by this event. More specifically, the year began when the Yending Star and Kwato’or aligned, with leap days added ad hoc when the calendar and the alignment drifted out of sync.
The start of the Solar and Storm year coincide every 33 solar years, or 25 storm years. Coincidentally this number is 55 in the Junda’s base 6 number system. This period is called a generation: the time taken for a man to grow, have a child, and have that child mature (with the assumption that a man marries at 16). The longer-scale Junda calendar is measured by these cycles of conjunction. An “age” was five conjunctions: ie 125 storm years, or 198 solar years). An age was how long an average man endured in living memory; three full lifetimes including his own, up to the death of his grandchildren.
Each solar year has five seasons, with a storm year having an extra month. The name of the month had the solar month as the first part, and the storm month as the second. Over time the calendrial seasons would drift from the solar/storm pattern, but months were reset either at midwinter (the start of the solar year), or when Kwato'or was observed at its brightest in the sky. The calendar is divided as follows:
- 1 Week = 6 Days
- 1 Month = 3 Weeks
- 1 Season = 15 Months +1 day (91 days roughly equals a solar season. The first week of each season starts with a day festival.)
- 1 Storm Year = 6 seasons = 30 months = 546 days
- 1 Generation/Conjunction = 25 storm years (33 solar)
- 1 Age = 125 storm years (198 solar)