Easter Dates

I love this type of information. (Info paraphrased from an informative email)

- Do you realize how early Easter is this year and why? It's March 23! As you may know, Easter is always the 1st Sunday after the 1st full moon after Ostara, or the Spring Equinox (which is March 20 this year). This dating of Easter is based on the lunar calendar that Hebrew people used to identify Passover, which is why it moves around in date on our Roman based calendar.

http://stardate.org/nightsky/moon/

The link above is the moon calendar for this month. You can see that the Spring Equinox was yesterday (March 20th this year), and the full moon is tomorrow (or tonight, depending on timezone). Making Easter the next day (this Sunday).

Other info on the subject:

- Based on the above, Easter can actually be one day earlier (March 22) but that is pretty rare. Here's the interesting info. This year (2008) is the earliest Easter any of us will ever see for the rest of our lives! And only the most elderly of our population have ever seen it this early (95 years old or above!). And none of us have ever, or will ever, see it a day earlier!

- The latest date that Easter can fall is April 25th.