“Stonehenge was built to align with the sun, and to Neolithic people, the skies were arguably as important as the surrounding landscape. At solstice we remember the changing daylight hours, but the changing seasons, the cycles of the moon and the movements of the sun are likely to have underpinned many practical and spiritual aspects of Neolithic life.”
It’s summer solstice — and you know what that means. Stonehenge! The place, and the song. Raise your eyes to the heavens at first light — and give it up for Spinal Tap.
In ancient times/Hundreds of years before the dawn of history/Lived a strange race of people, the Druids.
No one knows who they were or what they were doing/But their legacy remains/Hewn into the living rock, of Stonehenge.
For thousands of years — after the dawn of history, you might say, but before the dawn of the internet — countless pilgrims have made the journey to the prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, Wales, to pay their respects to the ring of standing stones, each one some four metres (134 feet) high and two metres (seven feet) wide, set in the middle of the most dense collection of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in the UK, not to mention several hundred burial mounds.
And now, in acknowledgement of the Northern Hemisphere’s longest day of the year — the day the sun reaches its highest position in the sky, relative to the North Pole, and the Earth’s maximum axial tilt toward the sun is 23.44° — the charity English Heritage, responsible for some 400 historic monuments throughout England and Wales, has established a round-the-clock live feed from a camera close to the stones, so anyone anywhere in the world can tune in whenever they like to see the sun and shadows play against the monolithic stones virtually in real time, as it’s happening.
After dark, the image is replaced by a computer-generated image of the night sky as it would be
the moment a visitor clicks on the link to the website.
The Stonehenge Skyscape project, as it’s being called, will allow those who can’t make the pilgrimage in person to experience sunrise, sunset and the ever-changing night sky as it’s happening, more or less, and make them feel closer to — if not David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and David Smalls exactly — perhaps the ancient people who created the stone circle in the first place.
Stonehenge Skyscape is not a live feed precisely but rather a composite representation of the past 24 hours of the sky above the stones, accurate to within a window of roughly five minutes.
After dark, it switches from a photography-based image to a computer-generated image which depicts the live location of the stars and visible planets.
https://www.stonehengeskyscape.co.uk
London-based science educator and space scientist Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock will co-sponsor a star- and moon-gazing event next month, timed to coincide with 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, on July 24, 1969.
To hear Spinal Tap call it,
Stonehenge! ’Tis a magic place/Where the moon doth rise with a dragon’s face
Stonehenge! Where the virgins lie/And the prayers of devils fill the midnight sky.
Live, online.
©English Heritage/Stonehenge Skyscape
