alt Hacker NewsThe ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
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What I find cute is that every year on the 21st of december a small number of modern day pagans and nature lovers gather at Ales Stenar here in southern Sweden and watch the sun rise over the center stone of the "ship".
We bring thermos bottles, some bring kids, pets, and we just stand there in silence watching the sun.
Afaik it's not coordinated, it's just a bunch of people having the same idea every year.
This reminded me of The Anasazi Sun Temple that catches the first light of the Summer Solstice in a specific point in the temple. I first discovered this watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos early this year (which I'd highly recommend, BTW)
my modern equivalent(I needed last year for surfing (after i needed to cut a surf trip short as it became night))
How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was? If you didn't tell me it was the 21st, I don't know how I'd be able to tell you other than by carefully measuring the sunrise and sunset times
Where I live, I find it wild that there is a 5.75-hour difference between the summer and winter solstices, nearly a quarter of a whole day.
In India,
https://www.etvbharat.com/english/bharat/padmanabha-swamy-te...
Kerala, for the curious, is also the place where the infinite series (and with it arguably calculus) was devised some 200 years before Newton's birth.
Blatant Western-centrism within academia (and the strange, almost primitive-hatred for living ancient-cultures) perhaps hasn't led either to the recognition of "ancient" monuments in India or its scientific/astronomical outputs.
The festival of Sankranti for eg. is so old that due to the Hindu Luni-Solar calendar's usage of the sidereal year, it has drifted off from the winter-solstice by 20 odd days, starting from 150 BC (amusingly as has the Julian calendar, but due to a lack of precision in arithmetic / observational accuracy).
When an aperture is aligned to the winter solstice, it is also aligned to avoid light the rest of the year. An early attempt at air conditioning? Keep the heat out.
We jump so quickly to religious significance.
These are all over the place in Norway (as are they everywhere else, presumably!)
When we moved to the island we currently live on, our address was in a road called 'Solsteinen' (The Sun Stone), but I didn't think anything of it until I realized that the roughly hewn stone serving as the property limit marker was juuu-uuust touched by the sun on Winter Solstice. Aha.
A quick call to the local archaeologist confirmed my suspicion - 'Oh, so you're the new resident there, I'd planned on being in touch - that stone monument has been there for more than 2000 years, is A-listed and please, whatever you do, don't do anything with it. Seriously.'