March 29, 2024

nutural view. New Yorkers celebrate the perfect sunset

At the start of the week, New York City once again had something in common with the craggy megastructure of Stonehenge: Because the sun was at a special angle, there was a pleasant atmosphere.

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  • At the beginning of the week, New York’s Manhattan landscape can be admired again.
  • The sun sets at a special angle on the city’s lanes.
  • The scenic views are made possible by the special circumstances of New York.

Twice a year, the druids literally dance at Stonehenge, England: thousands of visitors – often in Celtic costume – celebrate the winter and summer solstices on December 22 and June 21 at the Stone Age monument.

Reason: This is exactly when the sun rises behind the so-called “heel stone”, the entrance to the world-famous millennia-old stone circle, and the sun’s rays fall in the middle of the monument. The two days are believed to have been celebrated here for thousands of years.

New Yorkers did not pay attention to this phenomenon for a long time

Of course, the Big Apple could do what old Europe could do. Only on Mondays and Tuesdays New Yorkers celebrate “Manhattanhenge”. For a few minutes the sun shone among the valleys of skyscrapers, casting a warm glow on the asphalt.

New Yorkers can even observe this phenomenon four times a year: in the winter around December 5th and January 8th and in the summer around May 28th and July 13th.

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The landscape is actually nothing new. But no one in New York took notice until the famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote an article about the natural phenomenon in 2002 and called it “Manhattanhenge,” a reference to Stonehenge, SPIEGEL reported.

It was also seen in other cities

According to deGrasse Tyson, the event is only possible in a city with a right-angle, flat road network, and also requires an unobstructed view of the skyline, such as Manhattan in the west toward New Jersey. Skyscrapers along the streets will make things more interesting.

This combination may only be found in New York, deGrasse Tyson said. “Manhattanhenge seems to be a unique phenomenon in the world, if not in the universe,” the magazine quoted him as saying. Similar events take place – in cities such as Baltimore, Cambridge, Chicago, Montreal and Toronto.