This magical event has become a social phenomenon in New York City.

ew Yorkers have witnessed an urban solar phenomenon, with the Sun setting in alignment with the city’s skyscrapers and giving an effect fans say is reminiscent of Wiltshire’s Stonehenge. Welcome to Manhattanhenge.

Twice every year amateur photographers gather in carefully-selected spots to set up tripods and wait to capture the ultimate sunset.

On Wednesday night at8:25  local time  the east-west lying streets of the city’s famous grid system neatly framed the setting sun, creating golden glows New Yorkers rarely see.

During the phenomenon, the Sun appears to be nestled perfectly between the skyscraper corridors, illuminating the north and south sides of the streets.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson coined the term Manhattanhenge in 1996, inspired by its likeness to Stonehenge, where the sun aligns with concentric circles of vertical stones on each of the solstices.

“As a kid, I visited Stonehenge in the Salisbury Plain of England and did research on other stone monuments across the British Isles. It was deep within me,” says deGrasse Tyson.

“So I was, in a way, imprinted by the emotional power that terrestrial alignments with the Sun can have on a culture or civilization.”

After coining the term, deGrasse Tyson later published dates and times in Natural History magazine.

Similar “henge” phenomena also occur in other cities with large numbers of skyscrapers and long straight streets – such as Chicago, Montreal and Toronto.

As far as sunset goes – which is the fans’ true Manhattanhenge – the event happens in May and July, and for two nights each. There’s also the winter version, but that’s sunrise.

New York-based photographer Emon Hassan has celebrated Manhattanhenge in his work.

“You’ll see photographers on both sides, lined up, just waiting. In one area, I could go in the middle of the street and get the shot. Photographers risk their lives to get the perfect shot.

It’s cut-throat. You only have a 15 to 20 minute window. It happens pretty quick after you consider dodging traffic.

“I don’t even know how to articulate that feeling. It’s almost like seeing an eclipse.”

Getty photographer Mario Tama shot the event earlier this year. He says the event provides residents with a moment of clarity and beauty in a chaotic world.

“Basically, people in Manhattan are trapped in an island of tall buildings and sometimes can’t even see the sky really.

“It’s a brilliant moment when Manhattanites can connect with the rest of the world and with the Earth. If you get out of the subway at 34th Street, you’ll see two or three hundred people with tripods jumping in the street. Usually when this happens, there has been a shooting or something, so this is really a beautiful thing,” says Tama.

“Amateur and professional photographers can meet up, they tag each other’s work on Twitter and meet other people – people with other interests,” says Hassan.

“Manhattan is one of the most fascinating places and this is such a unique event.”

Its distinctiveness lies in the positioning of the city’s layout.

Manhattan’s Commissioner’s Plan of 1811 established its grid system, which is rotated 29 degrees from true east-west. If Manhattan’s streets were perfectly laid out on an east-west grid, Manhattanhenge would occur facing both east and west on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

It also has the advantage over other skyscraper cities because of a relatively clear view to the horizon down some of its streets.

For photographers and people taking an early evening stroll, it is just a beautiful effect of light.

But for astronomers, it’s something more – a chance to engage laymen and enthusiasts with the studies of the cosmos.

DeGrasse Tyson uses the event to make people more interested in astronomy.

“I’ll take any excuse I can get to get people to look up and notice our cosmic environment,” deGrasse Tyson recently told PBS television.

The best vantage point to view the event, which he describes as “the greatest of the cosmos together with the greatest of our urban icons”, is on Park Avenue and 34th Street, looking west, he says.

Virginia Brown, BBC Magazine

Emon Hassan, Photos

COUNTY WILTSHIRE – Archaeologists working for BP have made a startling new find at Stonehenge – oil.

Just two days ago, archaeologists found another ceremonial monument only a few hundred yards from the stone circle that makes up Stonehenge.  BP sent a crew out to look at the ceremonial monument and once there, they started an exploratory drill.  Soon after, they hit oil.

“We plan on getting a drilling rig out here in the next two weeks,” said BP CEO Tony Hayward.  “I think we’ll be able to get 30,000 barrels a day out of Stonehenge.  It couldn’t come at a better time, since we’re losing a lot of production due to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Professor Vince Godfrey of the University of Birmingham said Thursday that the new find will completely change Stonehenge. “It’s just not going to be the same with a big oil rig in the center of the ancient stone circle.”  Some in England are worried about the tourists that annually flock to Stonehenge.  “The reason they built Stonehenge in 2500 B.C. was so that tourists could come and walk around and then go to the pubs and buy beer,” said Fiona Barstow a local barmaid.  “But who’s going to want to come here now and trample on these ancient stones? It’s a bloody shame.”  When Ms. Barstow was told that BP would be paying her three times her annual salary for the next thirty years, she ran into the street and yelled, “Drill, baby, drill!”

The origins of Stonehenge are unclear, but many Americans have said that they believe it to be nothing but “a bunch of bullshit.”  Tim Hayes of Port Jefferson, New York said he traveled with his family to England last year to see Stonehenge and they were all disappointed.  “Somebody just put a bunch of stones in a circle. Big deal.  I have friends who did something like that in grade school back in Manhasset.  This is bullshit.”

Stonehenge has long been a place of pilgrimage  for neo-druids, and for certain others following pagan  or neo-pagan beliefs. Every year on the summer solstice, druids and pagan-worshippers come and chant, ring bells and masturbate near the ancient stones.   BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, said that Druids and Pagans would be allowed to visit the BP oil rig at Stonehenge every summer solstice but, “if they get within a hundred yards of our rig, we will shoot to kill.”

BP has apologized to anyone that is offended or upset about the drilling at Stonehenge.  They will move ahead with the drilling but, “at least we said we’re sorry,”  said Tony Hayward. After destroying the Gulf of Mexcio and Stonehenge, BP is now actively looking at other natural (and man-made) sites that they can destroy. “Once we destroy everything, then we can go back and make it green,” said Svanberg.

BP Stonehenge… see the ruin.

WILTSHIRE – Archaeologists have discovered a new stone circle near Stonehenge!

The new stone circle was found about a mile away, sitting along the River Avon. It is made of 25 blue Welsh stones, hence its nickname, “Bluestonehenge.”

The circle lends further weight to the theory that Stonehenge was part of a funeral complex. Archaeologists believe people would ride down the river by boat and step off into Bluestonehenge. There, they would congregate and then carry the remains of their dead down a funeral processional route to a cemetery at Stonehenge.

“Not many people know that Stonehenge was Britain’s largest burial ground at that time,” said Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield who co-directed the excavation project since 2004. “Maybe the blue stone circle is where people were cremated before their ashes were buried at Stonehenge itself.”

Although the actual stones were moved some time ago, the size of the pits left behind, 33 feet in diameter, indicated to excavators that the stones came from the Preseli Mountains of Wales, about 150 miles away.

Archaeologists believe the Neolithic people dragged the blue stones along the funeral route to Stonehenge, to incorporate them into the final rebuilding around 2500 BC. It is most likely they make up the inner circle of Stonehenge. The scientists intend to use radiocarbon dating to determine when each set of stones was put up.

Puma Punku is a set of ruins in Bolivia, not well known outside of archaeologist and UFOlogist circles. Why have these stones attracted two seemingly opposite groups?

The ruins are what is left of the Pumapunku pyramid, a temple that stood at least 56 feet tall. It is located in Tiahuanaco, near Lake Titicaca, a region associated with pre-Incan culture. Archaeologists believe the temple may have been built for worshipping the creation god Viracocha, but have no definitive evidence either way.

But the real mystery lies in how Puma Punku was built. Many of the blocks weighed 200 tons, with one even weighing in at 450 tons! How were these blocks brought to a plateau 13,000 feet high? While Stonehenge’s method is often explained as stones being rolled on tree trunks, the tribe would have had no access to trees on the barren plateau. The wheel had supposedly not been invented by that point, leaving archaeologists without an explanation.

Once the stones were brought to the site, they were cut so precisely that they could be fit together like puzzle pieces.

Some of these stones have perfectly straight grooves in them that are only 1 cm deep. Note the sets of equi-distant holes that were drilled in the picture below. If the stones are made of the hardest granite there is, how could the tribe have possible put these markings into the stones? What tools did they have available to them, and where did they come from?

UFO and alien experts believe the people who built these stones had contact with extraterrestrial beings. This is often referred to as the “ancient astronaut theory”. These beings would have either completely built the temple themselves, or assisted the humans in building it by providing instruction and advanced tools.

Scientists call these theories bunk, but cannot provide any better explanation for how primitive humans fit 200-ton stones together or planned the intricate process without the ability to read or write.

]]> http://weeklyworldnews.com/aliens/6766/puma-punku/feed/ 219 Maleeka Spriggs puma_punku pp_ruins ppdiagram pp_grooves1 http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/397/early-stapling/ http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/397/early-stapling/#comments Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:29:37 +0000 Dallas Commagreens http://www.wwnmedia.com/?p=397 ]]>

AMESBURY, UK — A recent dig has not only revealed when Stonehenge was built (2300 BC) but why! Ground-penetrating radar has revealed sheaves of inscribed animal skins beneath the ancient rock of Stonehenge. This discovery may finally explain the nature of these mysterious monuments.

“I believe the monoliths are primitive staples binding the earliest known writing in the British Isles,” said Dr. William Atkinson of the Homeland Department of Old Things. Every staple was probably placed by hand since no device existed for driving such massive objects through the animal skins — though Bronze Age rock carvings discovered on the site long thought to be a catapult or similar siege engine may represent an early design for such a device.

“In any case, stapling was rather a lot of work so they gave up,” Dr. Atkinson said. “We didn’t see another staple in human history until the McMurphy Company patented a ‘Single-Stroke Staple Driver’ 4500 years later in 1877.”

Home Dep OT’s work has forced a complete re-imagining of Stonehenge. Scientists now understand the ancient stones’ alignment with the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset was an attempt to maximize natural reading light. “Moreover, the Bronze Age people we’ve found buried near the site were probably involved in building the staples,” Dr. Atkinson added. “Fittingly, they were memorialized in their own invention.”

In the meantime, Dr. Atkinson has already moved on to new research in Egypt, working on a controversial theory that Thutmosis III habitually opened papyrus letters with the tip of his obelisk.