Manhattanhenge

[Lily]

http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/resour ... attanhenge

What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England.
....
May 30th, and July 12th, the setting Sun aligns precisely with the Manhattan street grid.

[Explorer]

http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/resources/starstruck/manhattanhenge

What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England.
....
May 30th, and July 12th, the setting Sun aligns precisely with the Manhattan street grid.

hahaha, very good.
Yes, everything is an alignment that way. Something on the ground always lines up with something rising/setting/passing in the sky at some point, and you can calculate them fairly easy. The only thing is that either the date or the structure needs to be fixed. Manhattan is a fixed structure, so you come up with arbitrary dates. In Stonehenge the dates are fixed. (Unless it is a coincidence that some of the stones line up with the solstices).
I want to build my own henge someday ;-).

[DaRC]

Yes but will the non-alignment of the streets in lower Manhatten really mess with their heads

[DJ Droood]

Yes but will the non-alignment of the streets in lower Manhatten really mess with their heads

I think we can safely blame the Dutch for any issues with lower Manhatten...btw, if you are interested in Manhatten *before* Europeans, National Geographic had a great issue last year on that topic.

[Dendrias]

While we are on the subject, when viewed from all latitudes north of the Tropic of Cancer (23.5 degrees north latitude), the Sun always rises at an angle up and to the right, and sets and an angle down and to the right. That's how you can spot a faked sunrise in a movie: it moves up and to the left. Filmmakers are not typically awake in the morning hours to film an actual sunrise, so they film a sunset instead, and then time-reverse it, thinking nobody will notice.

Hey, I've seen "fake sunrises" in movies playing in southern Africa or Australia. I knew they all fake it.

[Ghostrider]

Yes but will the non-alignment of the streets in lower Manhatten really mess with their heads

I think we can safely blame the Dutch for any issues with lower Manhatten...btw, if you are interested in Manhatten *before* Europeans, National Geographic had a great issue last year on that topic.

HEY!!! Don't blame us! We had just got rid of Spanish Catholic influences! We didn't have a CLUE as to what we were doing at that time!