Calendars  •  • [ e]
Common use	Chinese Islamic Gregorian ISO Astro Julian
	Calendar Types
	Lunisolar Solar Lunar
Selected usage	Armenian Bah' Bengali Berber Buddhist Coptic Ethiopian Germanic Hebrew Hindu Indian Iranian Irish Japanese Javanese Malayalam Maya Nanakshahi Nepali Nepal Sambat Tamil Thai: Lunar – Solar Tibetan Vietnamese Zoroastrian
	Calendar Types
	Original Julian Runic

A lunisolar calendar is a calendar in many cultures whose date indicates both the moon phase and the time of the solar year. If the solar year is defined as a tropical year then a lunisolar calendar will give an indication of the season; if it is taken as a sidereal year then the calendar will predict the constellation near which the full moon may occur. Usually there is an additional requirement that the year has a whole number of months, in which case most years have 12 months but every second or third year has 13 months.

Examples

The Buddhist, Hebrew, Hindu lunisolar, Tibetan calendars, Chinese calendar used alone until 1912 (and then used along with the Gregorian calendar) and Korean calendar (used alone until 1894 and since used along with the Gregorian calendar) are all lunisolar, as was the Japanese calendar until 1873, the pre-Islamic calendar, the republican Roman calendar until 45 BC (in fact earlier, because the synchronization to the moon was lost as well as the synchronization to the sun), the first century Gaulish Coligny calendar and the second millennium BC Babylonian calendar. The Chinese, Coligny and Hebrew lunisolar calendars track the tropical year whereas the Buddhist and Hindu lunisolar calendars track the sidereal year. Therefore the first three give an idea of the seasons whereas the last two give an idea of the position among the constellations of the full moon. The Tibetan calendar was influenced by both the Chinese and Hindu calendars. The English also used a lunisolar calendar before their conversion to Christianity .

The Islamic calendar is a lunar, but not lunisolar calendar because its date is not related to the sun. The Julian and Gregorian Calendars are solar, not lunisolar, because their dates do not indicate the moon phase — however, without realising it, most Christians do use a lunisolar calendar in the determination of Easter.

There are some lunisolar calendar reform proposals: One is the Hermetic Lunar Week Calendar which normally consists of 12 lunar months and a leap month every 2 or 3 years, and with a year that always starts near the vernal equinox. Another is the Simple Lunisolar Calendar, whose year always begins between Gregorian December 3 and January 1. Also there is the Meyer-Palmen Solilunar Calendar whose year always begins near the vernal equinox by using a 2498258 days in 84599 months in a 6840-year-cycle rule.

Determining leap months

To determine when an embolismic month needs to be inserted, some calendars rely on direct observations of the state of vegetation, while others compare the ecliptic longitude of the sun and the phase of the moon.

On the other hand, in arithmetical lunisolar calendars, an integral number of synodic months is fitted into some integral number of years by a fixed rule. To construct such a calendar, the average length of the tropical year is divided by the average length of the synodic month, which gives the number of average synodic months in a year as:

12.368266......

Continued fractions of this decimal value give optimal approximations for this value. So in the list below, after the number of synodic months listed in the numerator, an integer number of tropical years as listed in the denominator have been completed:

12 / 1 = 12 (error = -0.368266... synodic months/year) 25 / 2 = 12.5 (error = 0.131734... synodic months/year) 37 / 3 = 12.333333... (error = 0.034933... synodic months/year) 99 / 8 = 12.375 (error = 0.006734... synodic months/year) 136 / 11 = 12.363636... (error = -0.004630... synodic months/year) 235 / 19 = 12.368421... (error = 0.000155... synodic months/year) 4131 / 334 = 12.368263... (error = -0.000003... synodic months/year)

The 8-year cycle (99 synodic months, including 3 embolismic months) was used in the ancient Athenian calendar. The 8-year cycle was also used in early third-century Easter calculations (or old Computus) in Rome and Alexandria.

The 19-year cycle (235 synodic months, including 7 embolismic months) is the classic Metonic cycle, which is used in most arithmetical lunisolar calendars. It is a combination of the 8- and 11-year period, and whenever the error of the 19-year approximation has built up to a full day, a cycle can be truncated to 8 or 11 years, after which 19-year cycles can start anew. Meton's cycle had an integer number of days, although Metonic cycle often means its use without an integer number of days. It was adapted to a mean year of 365.25 days by means of the 4×19 year Callipic cycle (used in the Easter calculations of the Julian calendar).

Rome used an 84-year cycle from the late third century until 457. Early Christians in Britain and Ireland also used an 84-year cycle until the Synod of Whitby in 664. The 84-year cycle is equivalent to a Callipic 4×19-year cycle (including 4×7 embolismic months) plus an 8-year cycle (including 3 embolismic months) and so has a total of 1039 synodic months (including 31 embolismic months). This gives an average of 12.369047... synodic months per year (with error=0.011123... synodic months/year, a less good approximation than the regular 8-year Athenian cycle or the Metonic 19-year cycle).

The last listed approximation with the 334-years cycle (4131 synodic months, including 123 embolismic months) is very sensitive to the adopted values for the lunation and year, especially the year. There are different possible definitions of the year, other approximations may be more accurate. For example (4366/353) is more accurate for a vernal equinox tropical year and (1979/160) is more accurate for a sidereal year.

Calculating a "leap month"

A rough idea of the frequency of the intercalary or leap month in all lunisolar calendars can be obtained by the following calculation, using approximate lengths of months and years in days:

• Year: 365.25, Month: 29.53
• 365.25/(12 × 29.53) = 1.0307
• 1/0.0307 = 32.57 common months between leap months
• 32.57/12 − 1 = 1.7 common years between leap years

A representative sequence of common and leap years is ccLccLcLccLccLccLcL, which is the classic nineteen-year Metonic cycle. The Buddhist and Hebrew calendars restrict the leap month to a single month of the year, so the number of common months between leap months is usually 36 months but occasionally only 24 months elapse. The Chinese and Hindu lunisolar calendars allow the leap month to occur after or before (respectively) any month but use the true motion of the sun, so their leap months do not usually occur within a couple of months of perihelion, when the apparent speed of the sun along the ecliptic is fastest (now about 3 January). This increases the usual number of common months between leap months to roughly 34 months when a doublet of common years occurs while reducing the number to about 29 months when only a common singleton occurs.

References

• Introduction to Calendars, US Naval Observatory, Astronomical Applications Department.

See also

• Month
• Solar calendar
• Lunar calendar

External links

• Panchangam for your city Panchangam for your city based on High Precision Drika Ganita.
• Perpetual Chinese Lunar Program The Chinese calendar is one of the oldest lunisolar calendars.
• Lunisolar Calendar Page contains a useful description of the difference between lunar calendars and lunisolar calendars.
• A simple lunisolar calendar As the name suggests, this is a simple example of a lunisolar calendar that utilises the Gregorian calendar. A discussion of issues that affect accuracy is included.
• Calendar studies A general discussion of calendar systems including two examples of lunisolar calendars.