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Hi Curtis,

I think you must have missed my post above. I got this from Wikipedia:
Four Catholic countries - Spain, Portugal, the Polish?Lithuanian Commonwealth, and most of Italy - implemented the new calendar on the date specified by the bull, with Julian Thursday, 4 October 1582 being followed by Gregorian Friday, 15 October 1582. The Spanish and Portuguese colonies adopted the calendar later because of the slowness of communication. Other Catholic countries soon followed. France adopted the new calendar with Sunday, 9 December 1582 being followed by Monday, 20 December 1582. The Dutch provinces of Brabant, Zeeland and the Staten-Generaal also adopted it on 25 December of that year, the provinces forming the Southern Netherlands (modern Belgium) except the Duchy of Brabant on 1 January 1583, and the province of Holland followed suit on 12 January 1583.

Many Protestant countries initially objected to adopting a Catholic invention; some Protestants feared the new calendar was part of a plot to return them to the Catholic fold.
So the implementation of the new calendar across Europe was a very patchy affair with most Protestant countries holding out much longer.

For example the United Kingdom of Great Britain (including its American colonies) didn't adopt the calendar until 1752. What is not generally, reported though is that as an independent state Scotland had already adopted the new calendar in 1600! I am still not entirely, clear what calendar was being used in Scotland between 1707 (political union with England) and the adoption of the new calendar everywhere in the British empire. Did Scotland have to revert to the Julian calendar for those 45 years? I am still not clear. :)

In orthodox countries in Europe such as Russia, Greece and Romania there was similar suspicion of this 'Roman Catholic' calendar and the Gregorian calendar was not adopted in these countries until the 20th century.

Here some useful links on the topic. The position of Sweden was especially bewildering!

http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/ye ... tries.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar

http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/jul ... witch.html

Mark
As thou conversest with the heavens, so instruct and inform thy minde according to the image of Divinity William Lilly

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Thanks Mark.

I had to deal with this issue years ago when I wrote a DateTime component based upon Jean Meeus's Astronomical Algorithms. It was the first component I wrote for the Delphi environment back in the 90's and was a precursor to writing astrological software. The calendar issue came up on whether to use Julian or Gregorian after a certain date (in Oct 1582 for most of Europe). It was later used in Timaeus planetary hours software which involves calculating the 168 hours of the week according to astronomical rise and set times of the Sun. I was able to use Kepler's equation of center for the early versions, but shortly thereafter discovered the Swiss Ephemeris DLL. I was on my way to calculating the planets positions using perturbation terms and the JPL ephemeris after discovering Jeffrey Sax's Pascal routines had a problem for post 2000 dates myself until Alois Triendl saved me from that. This is where I ran into the calendar issue.
Curtis Manwaring
Zoidiasoft Technologies, LLC