A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)

I first heard about this in a Graham Hancock book. Found it a fascinating example of an attempt to encode a date that far distant future generations might understand (provided it survives).

For a hypothesis concerning the precession of the equinoxes and religious pantheons, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574

This is the kind of stuff I love about ancient architecture. It seems they were full of such clever things (or maybe only the few constructions which survived until today).

Its nice to see that some people still care about creating such thoughtful art for modern constructions. It seems that most building of our time are just optimized for fast and efficient construction.

I hope there are many more out there, so that Earth's Graham Hancock of the year 16000 has something to explore on his/her ayahuasca trip.

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More:

> Due to the precession of the equinoxes (as well as the stars' proper motions), the role of North Star has passed from one star to another in the remote past, and will pass in the remote future. In 3000 BC, the faint star Thuban in the constellation Draco was the North Star, aligning within 0.1° distance from the celestial pole, the closest of any of the visible pole stars.[8][9] However, at magnitude 3.67 (fourth magnitude) it is only one-fifth as bright as Polaris, and today it is invisible in light-polluted urban skies.

> During the 1st millennium BC, Beta Ursae Minoris (Kochab) was the bright star closest to the celestial pole, but it was never close enough to be taken as marking the pole, and the Greek navigator Pytheas in ca. 320 BC described the celestial pole as devoid of stars.[6][10] In the Roman era, the celestial pole was about equally distant between Polaris and Kochab.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_star

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_pole