oh god, observing the moon to tell time for Official Reasons. So someone sees the moon, are they a reliable witness? Did they see the moon in the correct place or are they making it up or maybe they saw a bright star or whatever? ARE THEY SURE IT'S THE MOON?
This is why we went to a calculated calendar :P
But it does come back to how much can a random person on the street be able to tell about the calendar without consulting anyone. Like, if I didn't know the Georgian date, what could I figure out myself? Just the season. I couldn't do day of the week or day of the month or place in the month. So I could give you with... somewhat reasonable accuracy, based on the weather and sunset time. If I knew where I was. If you put me in Florida and told me to guess the month based on the weather and didn't tell me I was in Florida, I'd have problems.
For instrumentless measurements there also the position in the sun in the sky but that requires knowledge I don't have, plus, like, positions of the zodiac. Which I also don't know.
If you have multiple moons at various different orbit timings, you could pick one moon for month, one moon for day of the week (longer than 7 days, probably), maybe moons for various other things. If you've got 4 seasons and those tend to align to one of the moons, boom, that moon's phase is the season moon. You could estimate the calendar pretty quickly just by looking at the moons.
Also if we're starting all over from scratch, we really should mess with the week, too. That's something not observable, unlike months and years. Let's get ourselves a moon for the week.
no subject
This is why we went to a calculated calendar :P
But it does come back to how much can a random person on the street be able to tell about the calendar without consulting anyone. Like, if I didn't know the Georgian date, what could I figure out myself? Just the season. I couldn't do day of the week or day of the month or place in the month. So I could give you with... somewhat reasonable accuracy, based on the weather and sunset time. If I knew where I was. If you put me in Florida and told me to guess the month based on the weather and didn't tell me I was in Florida, I'd have problems.
For instrumentless measurements there also the position in the sun in the sky but that requires knowledge I don't have, plus, like, positions of the zodiac. Which I also don't know.
If you have multiple moons at various different orbit timings, you could pick one moon for month, one moon for day of the week (longer than 7 days, probably), maybe moons for various other things. If you've got 4 seasons and those tend to align to one of the moons, boom, that moon's phase is the season moon. You could estimate the calendar pretty quickly just by looking at the moons.
Also if we're starting all over from scratch, we really should mess with the week, too. That's something not observable, unlike months and years. Let's get ourselves a moon for the week.