[time-nuts] Solstice question, about 5000 years ago

Neville Michie namichie at gmail.com
Sun Dec 21 21:57:10 UTC 2008


The astronomers of 5000 years ago were amateurs, so of course they
made their own gear and found out what worked.
Now if you find a notch in a rock on a distant mountain and the  
shadow it casts every day at sunrise,
you only have to place a chalk mark on the wall each day to discover  
that the position change each day slows down
then reverses at the solstice.
Now you have a way to find the solstice, so you chip your chalk marks  
into the wall.
They show ten days to the solstice and the countdown to the day.
You have been making a good living telling people when the solstice  
is going to occur,
so you drag up some big rocks to sit in the right place to see the  
sunrise shadow as it approaches the solstice
so your son can inherit the business and make a good living when you  
shuffle off.
Your son runs the company of wise guru pty ltd, and he suggests that  
the really cool way to make
the next monument would be to have it point to the rising sun on the  
solstice.
He knows when it gets to the solstice so he sets up a few sticks to  
get the line to set the
stones to when they build the monument.
Ever since that new bits of information have been found, and when  
Kepler and Newton
had thrown their discoveries in we called it modern times. Then  
Einstein came along and we have time nuts.
cheers, Merry solstice,  Neville Michie

On 21/12/2008, at 9:25 PM, Michael Sokolov wrote:

> Bill Hawkins <bill at iaxs.net> wrote:
>
>> The passage grave at New Grange, Ireland, is one of those  
>> astronomical
>> wonders where the rising sun at winter solstice shines down a  
>> relatively
>> long tunnel to shine on carved stone at the far wall of a chamber.
>>
>> We know that solstice has the shortest day and the longest night.
>>
>> How'd they know that?
>
> I'll abstain from answering the last question, but I'm more interested
> in a different question: from what I understand, the exact shape of  
> the
> analemma depends on the misalignment between the line of apses  
> (aphelion
> and perihelion of Earth's slightly eccentric orbit) and the solstices
> and equinoxes defined by Earth's obliquity.  These things do change  
> very
> slowly over the course of millennia, don't they?  Isn't that change
> significant enough that the correct stone alignment would be different
> between today and 5000 y ago?  If they got it right 5000 y ago for  
> their
> epoch, why does it still work now?  Hasn't the analemma shifted far
> enough to break the alignment?
>
> Just wondering.
>
> MS
>
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