@eph I was just reading up on the Eastern Orthodox hours and would like some clarification. Is the First Hour prayer at Sunrise, or at a (variable/sundial?) hour after Sunrise? I looked at one wiki, and it says the first hour was at 6:00am, but the 3rd hour at 9:00am, which I assume is a mistake (since there's 3 hours in between 6 and 9, and 6:00 is usually deemed sunrise in sundial time, and would be the zeroeth hour technically). A different wiki says the first hour is at 7:00am (sundial time). I assume the second one is correct?
2 years ago 路 馃憤 eph
@krixano, you鈥檙e welcome! Honestly I was having trouble explaining it in words, so I鈥檓 glad the picture helped! Your screenshots look really promising, keep it up 馃榿 路 2 years ago
@eph Anyways, thanks for that image, it helps *a lot*! It tells me that the First Hour does indeed start at sunrise and go until the 3rd hour, and that Third Hour starts at three hours :D 路 2 years ago
@eph The problem with communicating about time is there's like a million different ways to count time, lol. There's military time (24-hour system), there's AM/PM, there's Roman Numerals, etc.
And sundials also used different systems. Some had sunrise as hour 0 (or 12) and sunset as hour 12, while others had sunrise as 6 and sunset as 6. And still others had Roman Numerals. And I'm sure there were other methods.
As long as the day and the night are each divided into 12 parts, then they can all convert to each other. 路 2 years ago
@eph Nope, that matches up with exactly what I have :D
Sunrise is 12:00am, sunset is 12:00pm. Noon is 6:00. Again, this is different from 12:00am that you see on regular clocks. Sundial time also looks the same, so 12:00am in sundial time would be 9:00am (as you've expressed) in regular time, but only for that day. Also, 12:00 == 00:00 (We call the second one military time here).
Sundial time is interesting because the length of an hour changes throughout the year, because the length of an hour is always the length of a day divided by 12. Sometimes a sundial hour is below 60 regular minutes, and sometimes it is above. 路 2 years ago
@krixano, that鈥檚 making sense, but I think the numbers are off. Check out this image, it鈥檚 a screenshot at about 9am regular time of a Byzantine timekeeping app I have on my phone.
gemini://eph.smol.pub/2D5CD844-D8EB-48C0-AB27-22544B1AB72B.jpeg
From what I understand, sunset is 00:00 路 2 years ago
gemini://eph.smol.pub/2D5CD844-D8EB-48C0-AB27-22544B1AB72B.jpeg
@eph Ah, wait... so is it called the First Hour because it happens during the First Hour (6:00-7:00), not that it *starts* at the First Hour (7:00)?
But that's odd to me because technically 8:00-9:00 is the 3rd hour after sunrise, because 6-7 is the first hour, 7-8 is the second, and 8-9 is the third hour (even though hour 3 is at 9:00). Am I making any sense? lol 路 2 years ago
@eph Jews also count sunset as the beginning of a day too. My calendar program can already handle this for the dates. But when it lists out the prayer times, it just lists the first one as what the first one would be after sunrise, because that's what people would see first when the wake up. 路 2 years ago
@eph Thanks! The Jewish prayer times work very very similarly, so I already know generally how the sundial time works, there's just two different ways to talk about it - the hour number, and the other traditional way where 6:00am is sunrise, 12:00pm is noon/midday, and 6:00pm is sunset I forget what the second way is called, but I'm sure there's a specific name for it.
I did try liturgy.io, but it didn't seem like it was using sundial time calculations. I will check again though.
Anyways, the main problem was wikipedia and another wiki had the First Hour at 6:00, which made no sense to me since it seems it was supposed to be 1 hour after sunset. 路 2 years ago
Sure! The first Hour is after sunrise, but can be read any time between sunrise and sundial hour 3. The liturgical day changes at sunset, not sunrise, so Vespers is technically the first service of the next day. Solar noon and midnight are at about sundial hour 6, which is the border between reading the 3rd Hour and the 6th Hour. The liturgical Hours can be read during a section of the day and aren鈥檛 typically locked to the sundial hour, i.e. 1st Hour is the morning, 3rd is mid morning, 6th is afternoon, and 9th is evening (but before sunset, which is Vespers)
http://liturgy.io liturgy.io is a great resource to look up the hours based on location 路 2 years ago
