Dragon Head Raising Day (Dragon Head Raising Festival)

Festive folk New Year pictures: On February 2nd, the dragon looked up.

On the second day of the second month of the lunar calendar, there is a proverb in China, "On the second day of February, the dragon looks up", which means that spring comes, everything recovers, and the dragon begins to sting people, which indicates that a year's farming activities are about to begin. In the north, February 2 is also called Dragon Head-Up Day, also known as Spring Festival. It was called the picnic festival in the south and the vegetable picking festival in ancient times. China people have had the custom of "February 2nd" since the Tang Dynasty. According to records, the origin of this sentence is related to the understanding of star movement in ancient astronomy and agricultural solar terms.

In China's ancient astronomical observation model, 28 constellations were identified on the ecliptic on Sunday, called 28 nights. The ancients divided these 28 stars into four palaces according to the southeast and northwest, with 7 nights in each palace, and attached them to four kinds of animals according to their images. Among them, the seven nights in the East Palace is imagined as a dragon stretching from north to south, consisting of 30 stars.

Stars are relatively static. When the position of the earth's revolution makes the dragon constellation and the sun in the same direction, the sunlight will drown the starlight, and people will not see the dragon in the sky. After a while, the position of the earth shifted and the dragon constellation appeared again. Time and again, the ancients discovered this law and used it to judge the seasons.