Stonehenge in Connecticut

This Labor Day weekend Marine and I decided to take a road trip. On Monday after hanging out at the Gillette Castle State Park for awhile and learning cool things about secret places, we were off to our next site, the Sachem Head Stonehenge, known as the “Circle of Life“. This Neo Stonehenge is constructed from seven hundred tons of Blue Pearl Norwegian granite, and sits in the private 11 acre estate of Jonathan & Bonnie Rothberg, facing the Long Island Sound.

Here are some of the pictures I took.

Circle of Life From the Fence

This Fence

A Bit Closer

Marine, The Henge and the Sound

and last, but not least…

In Black and White

I wish we could have touched them. :)

There are a million other spots and pictures we went to, but those are for later.

Good times.

-Cara

A Rare New York Moment

Manhattanhenge

In July I wrote an entry about Manhattanhenge. It is a time when the whole of Manhattan becomes its own Stonehenge. You can read more about it here. Marine and I went to check it out on July 11th and I took these pictures around 45th and 6th in Manhattan. A hundred years later, I have finally cleaned up the shots and put them up on my Flickr.  Enjoy the miracle of Manhattanhenge through my eyes.

Look to the sun.

-Cara

Manhattanhenge!

[Perched over 42nd Street, NOVA scienceNOW host Neil deGrasse Tyson is eager to show you his hometown’s own version of a Stonehenge magic moment.]

Manhattanhedge, why has a super nerd like me not heard about this occurrence till now (thank you Jorge Hernandez)? It happens twice a year over a course of 2 days. The setting sun aligns perfectly with Manhattan’s city grid of streets. A bit before 8PM on May 29th and 30th in 2008, a ray of sun shoots across the island along Manhattan’s east-west corridors. It lasts until the sun disappears from the sky over New Jersey.

The one we can still catch this year occurs on July 11th and 12th, around 8:25pm. If Manhattan’s grid had been built aligned on the geographic north-south line, then the days of Manhattanhenge would be the spring and fall equinoxes. It occurs on other dates because Manhattan’s street grid is rotated 30 degrees east from geographic north (This last bit of information I learned thanks to Channel 13/WNET).

A bit of trivia you may need in the future, Hayden Planetarium Director Neil deGrasse Tyson (host of Nova’s ScienceNow), the guy on the video above coined the term Manhattanhedge. You never know around here when that may come up in local bar trivia. :)

Look to the sun.

-Cara