This reminded me of The Anasazi Sun Temple that catches the first light of the Summer Solstice in a specific point in the temple. I first discovered this watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos early this year (which I'd highly recommend, BTW)
The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
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Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#12Where I live, I find it wild that there is a 5.75-hour difference between the summer and winter solstices, nearly a quarter of a whole day.
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#13Where I live, I find it wild that there is a 5.75-hour difference between the summer and winter solstices, nearly a quarter of a whole day.
Where I live, the difference is almost six months!
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#14Where I live, I find it wild that there is a 5.75-hour difference between the summer and winter solstices, nearly a quarter of a whole day.
For Orkney the difference in day length between winter and summer solstices is about 12 hours?
December: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/kirkwall?month=12&year=20...
June: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/kirkwall?month=6&year=202...
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#15How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was? If you didn't tell me it was the 21st, I don't know how I'd be able to tell you other than by carefully measuring the sunrise and sunset times
I’m sure you’d know that this was winter. If you line 2 sticks up with sunrise, and keep adjusting them every morning, eventually you’ll see that the sun stops rising further south and starts moving north again. You don’t need complex mathematics to work it out.
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#16How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was? If you didn't tell me it was the 21st, I don't know how I'd be able to tell you other than by carefully measuring the sunrise and sunset times
It seems unintuitive today because people living in cities and towns don’t usually see sunrises and sunsets from where they live. If you had a way to easily reference the sunrise and sunset points against known horizon, it’d be very easy to tell.
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#17my modern equivalent(I needed last year for surfing (after i needed to cut a surf trip short as it became night)) https://daylight.franzai.com/
and yes, the maths fails when you are super super high north or south
Hey! nice little useful web page. I like the minimalism of it.
Does the math fail because of not considering (i) equation of time and (ii) oblateness of the Earth ?
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#18[flagged]
> Blatant Western-centrism within academia (and the strange, almost primitive-hatred for living ancient-cultures) perhaps hasn't led either to the recognition of "ancient" monuments in India or its scientific/astronomical outputs.
Enough with this bullshit please? There are genuine reasons why the knowledge of the calculus of ancient Kerala didn't travel outside India during the late middle ages.
It is a fact that Madhava a mathematician and astronomer from the late middle ages, came up with calculus, and established the Nila School of Mathematics in Kerala. For some reason, the book (Yuktibhasa) that discusses this math is written in the local language Malayalam. Most scholars at the time only understood Sanskrit, including later Western scholars who were unable to find good Malayalam book. Because of this, it was difficult to have the works translated, especially since the works describe formal proofs of concepts like series expansion, which was not even known in the Northern India at the time.
Kerala was also under Portuguese rule at the time and was frequently faced with wars, so the school gradually declined and the math culture sort of died out.
The Mathematics of India by P.P. Divakaran discusses these themes.
P.S: Most of what I've said here is taken from this Numberphile video of another mathematician discussing the life and work of P.P. Divakaran (who recently passed away) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G23Jx0kPCSI
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#19How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was? If you didn't tell me it was the 21st, I don't know how I'd be able to tell you other than by carefully measuring the sunrise and sunset times
Honestly I bet you would have at least a reasonable intuition about it if you were among them. It's pretty remarkable how much our distractions and 'being indoors' all the time dulls our senses to nature.
I started doing astrophotography about three years ago. I'd always been interested in 'space' but never really spent hours upon hours out at night over the course of months actually just studying the night sky. I remember wondering as a kid how people even thought about planets or came up with these wild stories with the constellations...to me it just kind of looked like a bright field of randomly twinkling lights.
Well, when you're out every night from 10pm to 2am looking up, it all just kind of comes alive. You see everything. The motion of the planets, the elliptic upon which they travel, the gradual shift of the entire field as the seasons change, the undulations of the moon and it's varied trajectory across the sky. The shifting of the sun's set and rise and the ebb and flow of day vs night. Everything. Your mind just starts to harmonize with the rhythm of it all. It's pretty wonderful.
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#20How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was? If you didn't tell me it was the 21st, I don't know how I'd be able to tell you other than by carefully measuring the sunrise and sunset times
> How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was
Solstice is a small thing they figured long ago, there are things they managed that are much more complex than that. In India there are whole temples dedicated to astronomy and built to align with different celestial geometries.