JSA 2.1 (2016) 77–84 ISSN (print) 2055-348X doi: 10.1558/jsa.v2i1.30035 ISSN (online) 2055-3498 FORUM Lunar Extremes, Lunar Cycles and the Minor Standstill A. César González-García Instituto de Ciencias del Patrimonio, Incipit, CSIC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain cesar.gonzalez-garcia@incipit.csic.es Introduction: Extremes and Minor Standstill A lunar standstill, also named a lunistice in resonance of the solar ‘solstice’ (the Sun standing still), is the moment of the lunar month when the Moon is seen farthest north or south with respect to other positions of that particular swinging motion from a given position on Earth. As Lionel Sims indicates in his paper, these extremes are not completely ixed, due to the receding motion of the line of nodes, and thus, the extremes vary between a major and a minor extreme in an 18.6-year period (or 9.3 years if we take the period between a major and a minor extreme). Although it has been named “lunar standstill”, Sims argues that it is not a true stand- still as, in contrast with the solstice, the Moon is never to be found in that extreme for a long period of time. However, I would like to advocate otherwise. It is true that it cannot be compared with the period of stillness of the Sun in absolute terms (let us take Sims’ deinition of 11 days as a practical number for the sake of clarity). However, 11 days in 365 amounts to just about 3% of the year when we are going to ind the Sun near one of its extremes (6% if we consider both of them). This is in contrast with the Moon, which can be found near a given extreme for nearly two days (in some cases, three), or four days if we take both extremes north and south. This amounts to nearly 15% of the time in a tropical month. Clearly, it is easier to ind the Moon near its extremes than the Sun! This is exempliied in Figure 1. There we can see in light grey all the observable setting positions of the Moon for the two years of the major standstill (calculated for the period between April 2005 and March 2007 for the latitude of Stonehenge). It is clear that the two maxima near the extreme positions indicate that such locations are accumulation points in the lunar setting positions. From this diagram, it is three times more likely to ind the Moon near the extreme than in between.