Sun, moon and stars.

My journey to Stonehenge takes me past military towns and ominous tracks cris-crossing the road with signs warning of tanks. Latter, sitting on the grass, eating bread and olives, watching the literally hundreds of visitors arrive and circle the monument, the susurration of traffic sounds and wind and traffic is altered by the interruption of military aircraft flying over head, circling low and heading off into the trees beyond. Stonehenge is the perfect Bronze Age monument; The Bronze Age is characterised as a warrior culture and Stonehenge is located within that area of Britain most famous as an army training ground http://thingsinthree.blogspot.com/2011/08/stonehenge-end-of-august-2011.html During the Bronze Age Stonehenge was already old. Stonehenge, it would have seemed, had always been there in one form or another. The car park of my time covers the Mesolithic beginnings of the site and a thousand years from now, British Heritage's gift shop will be just another...

This photo makes it look worse than it was.... No shadows. All shadow. ... So.. I laid out the string. Using this plan. The burial stone '1' is marked by my bag in this photo. If you put 'posts' in the plan and rotate it to look through, you will see that there is a gap in the posts that would allow you to have walked through the monument south-west to north-east. But... Must admit, there isn't any real reason for me placing the plan in the center of the Sanctuary, other than to provide a marker. As you can see, the center post has moved at least half a meter away from the center. I enclosed the perimeter rings (carefully avoiding the man in the sleeping bag) and set about thinking how people would have entered the rings. I had never enclosed the rings before, always too caught up in getting the pathways right! But doing so made sense of the monument for me. Wattle and daub fences, enclose an outer and an inner ring, wi...

I feel a bit uneasy doing this... I've rotated the plan of The Sanctuary drawn up by Robert Cunnington, a Royal Engineers-trained surveyor. In 1930 magnetic declination- the difference between magnetic north and True North was thirteen degrees. The burial at The Sanctuary, using the plans (using north as drawn on the plan) as found in the report of the excavation by Maud Cunnington, is closer to 80 degrees. The concrete posts (the red ones are all over the place...but the blue ones seem to be in their original place). Magnetic declination is now just -1. So...as the plans are now, the burial stone is about 10 degrees north of east (80 degrees.) In 1930, north (by the compass) was 13 degrees west. Unfortunately when I made inquires to find out what year the posts were put in place, I drew a blank. If the plan is rotated to compensate for that 13 degrees... The burial is now aligned east from the center, directed to the only place i...

This morning the sun was eclipsed by the moon, which passed directly in front of the sun... Here at latitude 52, the sky did not become significantly darker; just  strange.  The light had an almost X ray quality to it. Colour was bleached out of the land, and shadows were more obvious and wrong. Even when 90% of the sun is covered by the moon, we don't get total darkness. The experience of a rapid onset of a night, a fall in temperature, silent birds and various optical illusions such as rainbow-tinted clouds and seeing clouds appearing to drop towards the earth at the time of maximum eclipse happened further north... The experience of a 90% eclipse is unsettling, but without welding glass I would not be able to see what was happening in the sky even if I squinted. I may have seen something biting the sun away if thin cloud had been in the way, But cloud is not a good or reliable filter. This means that even when a total eclipse happens -and they don't happen v...

Avebury is divided by roads into four quarters. I was walking along the path that runs beside the road, towards 'The Swindon stone' in the north-west quarter. A group of people were holding hands and standing around stone 44 (on this map). At first I thought that it had been 'attacked', that someone had painted the stone using a brush big enough, and paint white enough to cover a garage. I thought that the people were healing the stone... From a distance the graffiti seemed to be like the Ordinance Survey symbol for a church! But then, as the sun went behind a cloud, the image faded... It isn't graffiti. When the sun came out again, the patten looked more like this: Here is a very bad photo. Approximate angles... Hard to judge from this photo At 3 pm the sun is at an azimuth of 227 and the elevation angle is 14.5 degrees. How relevant is this effect of sun on stone? Is it purely accidental and if not how will I be able t...

From June the 12th until the end of the month, the midsummer sun rises at 49 degrees (azimuth) and sets at 311 degrees. The midsummer sun rises and sets at the same azimuth every day for almost a month. This means that there could be at least one early morning without rain, fog, hail or thunder for an intrepid person to dare the cold (I swear there was frost last time I was there at midsummer!) see where exactly the sun is, in relation to the position of posts of the Sanctuary. Sounds simple enough? Except the round concrete posts that used to mark the positions of the inner timber circles are now no longer accurate- add to that the question of did the Cunnington's correct for magnetic declination of not! So what you see now is just a bit confusing. And it is as if the Sanctuary is slowly changing shape, starting to echo the double circle surrounded by one large circle, layout of Avebury. But the original plan is in fact a cross within a circle. The only wa...

Years ago I drew the positions of rise and set positions of the New and Full Moon for each month of the year. Looking for patterns. It looks as if the position of the New and Full Moons at the equinox could be relevant. From the diagram you can see that: At the equinox, the full and new moons rise and set in the same position as each other. Here are the positions of full and new moon rise and set.