Winter solstice instant of the solstice can be calculated, direct observation of the solstice by amateurs is impossible because the sun moves too slowly or appears to stand still (the meaning of "solstice"). However, by use of astronomical data tracking, the precise timing of its occurrence is now public knowledge. One cannot directly detect the precise instant of the solstice (by definition, one cannot observe that an object has stopped moving until one later observes that it has not moved further from the preceding spot, or that it has moved in the opposite direction). Further, to be precise to a single day,
Six Months in a Convent book was soon followed by another bestselling supposed exposé, "Awful Disclosures of the Hotel-Dieu Nunnery", (1836) in which Maria Monk claimed that a convent in Montreal served as a harem for Catholic priests, and that any resulting children were murdered after baptism. The tale of Maria Monk was, in fact, clearly modeled on the Gothic novels popular in the early 19th century. This literary genre had already been used for anti-Catholic sentiments in works such as Matthew Lewis's "The Monk". Six Months in a Convent Six Months in a Convent is a memoir written by Rebecca Reed and published in