The orientation of the King's Knot of Stirling Castle

Using SunCalc.net we can see the orientation of the King's Knot of the Stirling Castle with respect to sunset and sunrise on solstices. Note the alignment to Midsummer sunset.

More details in my paper published in PHILICA and at:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2837181

Castlerigg stone circle

The stone circle at Castleriggis situated near Keswick in Cumbria. One of around 1,300 stone circles in the British Isles and Brittany, it was constructed as a part of a megalithic tradition that lasted from 3,300 to 900 BCE, during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages. (Wikipedia). It is in a location northern of the Hardknott Roman Fort.To have a detailed discussion of the alignment of the stones at Castlerigg, please visit this site
http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/englandcastlerigg.htm

In the following images, using SunCalc, we cans ee how the sun is moving above this stone circle.

Summer solstice

Winter solstice

Here the map showing position of the stone circle and of the roman fort.

SunCalc at the Hardknott Roman Fort

As told by its owner (Vladimir Agafonkin), SunCalc is an app that shows sun movement and sunlight phases during the given day at the given location, where we can see sun positions at sunrise, specified time and sunset. A thin orange curve is the current sun trajectory, and the yellow area around is the variation of sun trajectories during the year. The closer a point is to the center, the higher is the sun above the horizon.

Here an example: SunCalc at the hardkontt Roman Fort

Summer solstice

Winter solstice

More at:

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/01/07/let-in-light-ancient-roman-fort-designed-for-celestial-show/

Suncalc and ancient Sun

In a recent paper, entitled "Was Lepenski Vir an ancient Sun or Pleiades observatory?", the authors Vladan Pankovic, Milan Mrdjen and Miodrag Krmar, have discussed the hypotesis of the mesolithic village Lepenski Vir (9500 -- 5500 BC) as an ancient (one of the oldest) Sun observatory. The authors had been so kind to follow a method I suggested of using "freely available software" for the local Sun radiation direction simulation. I used sollumis.com , they used the suncalc.net software.

Here an example of suncalc software.

 

Solstices at the Hardknott Roman Fort

A roman fort in Britannia, a specific orientation to solstices

More at SSRN

Solstices at the Hardknott Roman Fort

Amelia Carolina Sparavigna

Department of Applied Science and Technology, Politecnico di Torino



Abstract

From the most ancient times, the Roman military camps were planned according to a certain ideal pattern that was also applied to the coloniae, the outposts established in the territories conquered by Rome. The planning of castra and colonies was based on a chessboard of parallel streets, the main of them being the Decumanus. Probably, some Decumani were oriented to confer a symbolic meaning to the place too. Here we discuss the distinctive layout of a castrum in the Roman Britannia, the Hardknott Fort, and its orientation to the solstices.

Keywords: Archeoastronomy, Solar Orientation, Solstices, Urban Planning, Satellite Images, Google Earth.

Solar orientation of Ales Stenar

Ales Stenar and the direction of the sun during the day as given by sollumis.com, on the Winter and Summer solstices. The image shows a good agreement with the solar orientation suggested in

Andrew M. Kobos, January/February, 2001. Ales Stenar: When? Who? What for?,

http://www.zwoje-scrolls.com/as/aleseng.html

More 

On the solar orientation of Ales Stenar site, A.C. Sparavigna

PORTO, POLITO, http://porto.polito.it/2507517/

and also
http://stretchingtheboundaries.blogspot.it/2012/04/ales-stone-boat.html

UPDATE AND UPGRADE (2016)

To see Ales Stenar and its orientaton to the MOON see this:

http://stretchingtheboundaries.blogspot.it/2016/09/ales-stenar-and-moon.html

On Ancient Chinese Towns

Sculpture of lion with three cubs from Dadu, discovered underneath the Ming era city wall, now on display in the Beijing Stone Carving Museum

Courtesy: Shizhao, Wikipedia    

Khanbaliq or Dadu  refers to a city which is the core of Beijing.   Dadu or Ta-Tu (大都, pinyin: Dàdū, Wade-Giles: Ta-tu), means "great capital" or "grand capital" in Chinese, the name for the capital of the Yuan Dynasty founded by Kublai Khan in China, and was called Daidu by the Mongols, which was a transliteration directly from the Chinese. It is known as Khanbaliq (汗八里), also spelled as Khanbalikh in Turkic languages, meaning "Great residence of the Khan", and Marco Polo wrote of it as Cambaluc.

On Khanbalik and other Chinese Towns, see please:

A possible role of sunrise/sunset azimuth in the planning of ancient Chinese towns by  A.C. Sparavigna,
PORTO POLITO, http://porto.polito.it/2519296/

Ancient solar observatories: Stonehenge

This is Stonehenge. The image shows directions of sun during the day. “The lines on the drawing show the direction and height (altitude) of the sun throughout the day. Thicker and shorter lines mean the sun is higher in the sky. Longer and thinner lines mean the sun is closer to the horizon”, according to Sollumis.com http://www.sollumis.com/. The site is located in the Google Maps. The direction of the sun is given on the summer solstice, choosing an altar at the circle for observation. We see that, at sunrise, the sun is passing near the stone outside the circle.

Ancient solar observatories: Syrian desert

The Syrian desert is covered by ancient stone structures created during Neolithic times, as I discussed in the paper, Stone circles on the harraat of Syrian desert, published at http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.4665
Some of these stone structures are circular, with radial lines of stones. These circles have been also compared with Stonehenge. Therefore, we can ask ourselves, are these solar observatories too, as Stonehenge is.
The answer is probably so, see my paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.2591
I used a software for the solar energy applications to see the direction of sun on sunrise and sunset of solstice. It seems that there is a good agreement. Therefore, the Syrian stone circles are probably the Stonehenges of Middle East.

This is one of the stone structure of Syrian Desert. The image shows directions of sun during the day. “The lines on the drawing show the direction and height (altitude) of the sun throughout the day. Thicker and shorter lines mean the sun is higher in the sky. Longer and thinner lines mean the sun is closer to the horizon”, according to Sollumis.com http://www.sollumis.com/. On the left, the site as it appears in the Google Maps. In the middle, the direction of the sun on the summer solstice, choosing the center of the circle for observation. We see that, at sunrise, the sun is passing near the dot. At the sunset the direction is that of a line. In the image on the right, we see the direction of the sun on winter solstice. At sunrise, the lines is passing between dots. The sunset has the direction of a radius (images have been obtained from original provided by Google Maps and sollumis.com).

Circles and lines!

Alignemnt at the sunrise on the winter solstice

At the site http://www.dp-news.com/en/detail.aspx?articleid=97188
it is told that "He (David Kennedy) explains that they come in a huge variety of forms, some being ‘kites’, structures that funnelled animals, some being seemingly random meandering lines of stone and others being rectangular. None are believed to be aligned with the stars, which has added to the mystery surrounding their purpose." Well, in my opinion it is not so.