Medical Center Henge
You might already know that yesterday was the first full day of spring.
And you might know too that on that day the sun rises due east and sets due west.
And -- bonus round -- you might have heard that Stonehenge and a few other ancient monuments act as giant solar calendars that line up just so on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.
Looking out the nearest lab window yesterday, I noticed a little Henge effect of my own.
I took this just a few minutes before the sun worked its way into the lower right hand corner of my field of view and disappeared completely. Whatever that little nub is out there -- see it to the left of the smokestack-looking column? -- that marks due west from my window. And that means out there lies whatever else is 42 degrees and 16 minutes north latitude, including:
Rockford, IL
Sioux City, IA
Medford, OR
Muroran, Japan (on Hokkaido)
Najin, North Korea
Chifeng, China
Nomgon, Mongolia
If you keep going until you're exactly halfway around the world at the same latitutde -- as far as you can get before you start coming back around -- you reach a spot in the Tien Shan Mountains, extreme western China, just a hundred miles or so from the Kazakhstan border. At the moment I snapped this picture, someone there might have been watching the sun as well, except rising due east.
I don't mean to sound as if I'm high, but it's a beautiful idea.
posted by stewchang @ 5:57 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Cool blog ! Hello ,i'm Max a 33 years old french canadian . I just opened a virtual irish pub the McDuff ...have a beer and enjoy yourself (jukebox... plany of games... giant screen...) a one of a kind blog . See you there ! You can sign the guest book...Max
http://McDuffPub.blogspot.com/
Perhaps to that crazy lonely mountain person in the far-flung reaches of China the sunrise would have looked something like this: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070323.html
Although that picture was taken from about 8 degrees south of the location you mentioned (35 N, somewhere in Iran), it's a good approximation of the view.
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