Empty Cities of the Full Moon Empty Cities of the Full Moon Empty Cities of the Full Moon is a science fiction novel by Howard V. Hendrix first published in 2001. The novel revolves around the near extinction of humanity by an artificial prion originally designed to help the mentally ill but which becomes a shamanistic pandemic of madness, shape-shifting and death. There are 2 plots-lines which each follow the same set of characters before and after this near extinction. The title of the novel comes from both the correlation between the pandemic's symptoms and the full moon, and that the pandemic effectively emptied the cities.
Equinox zero. Its latitude will not be exactly zero, since Earth is not exactly in the plane of the ecliptic. Its declination will not be exactly zero either. (The ecliptic is defined by the barycenter of Earth and the Moon combined.) The modern definition of equinox is the instants when the Sun's apparent geocentric longitude is 0° (northward equinox) or 180° (southward equinox). See the adjacent diagram. Because of the precession of the Earth's axis, the position of the vernal point on the celestial sphere changes over time, and the equatorial and the ecliptic coordinate systems change accordingly. Thus when specifying