Happy Summer Solstice (June 21)

• Summer Solstice: longest day and shortest night of year

Angkor Wat: equinoxes and solstices were encoded into the ancient architecture

The marvels of ancient Angkor

The best place to be this morning is in the former Khmer Empire, modern Cambodia, in the center of one of the largest ancient cities in the world at the Buddhist-Hindu temple at the center of it, Angkor Wat. (Wat means monastery complex or vihara).

• Almost 9,000 tourists see equinox sunrise at Angkor Wat – ASEAN Digest

The second-best place to be is in the middle of New York City at the holy site of "Manhattanhenge" where signs of intelligent life must have built a megastructure aligned with the astronomical objects in the visible sky, possibly with extraterrestrial assistance.

Here Comes the Sun (The Beatles)

Some say massive structures like the "Empire State" Building were in fact pre-Mud Flood architectural feats being taken credit for by modern builders with widely circulated photos of men eating lunch in precarious worksites as if that were all the proof needed.

LONDON, England — As the sun rose Saturday on the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, a crowd erupted in cheers at Stonehenge where the ancient monument in southern England has clocked the summer solstice over thousands of years.

• Summer solstice arrives, marking longest day of year
• What is 'Manhattanhenge' and when can you see it?

Best Angkor Wat, Cambodia, sunrise and sunset viewpoints (pinterest.com)

.

Sun also rises, not earth moving

The orange ball crested the northeast horizon behind the Heel Stone, the entrance to the stone circle, and shone its beam of light into the center of one of the world’s most famous prehistoric monuments.

The solstice is one of the few occasions each year when visitors are allowed to walk among the stones, which are otherwise fenced off.

• 

  What did the ancients know and practice?

  The miracle of Newgrange, Ireland, eclipses Stonehenge (like Adam's Calendar, Africa)...so that's why we've never heard of it. Newgrange (Irish Sí an Bhrú [1]) is a prehistoric monument in County Meath, Ireland, placed on a rise overlooking the River Boyne, five miles (8 km) west of the town of Drogheda [2]. It is an exceptionally grand passage tomb built during the Neolithic Period, around 3100 BC [3], making it older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. Newgrange is the main monument in the Brú na Bóinne complex, a World Heritage Site that also includes the passage tombs of Knowth and Dowth, as well as other henges, burial mounds [which are a kind of stupa], and standing stones [3]. Newgrange consists of a large circular mound with an inner stone passageway and cruciform chamber More

The crowd gathered before dawn at the World Heritage Site to mark the start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, beating the heat during the U.K.'s first amber heat-health alert issued since September 2023.

Temperatures later topped 91.4 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius) in Surrey, 80 miles (128 kilometers) east of Stonehenge, the hottest temperature recorded in the U.K. so far this year.

About 25,000 sun devotees (sun cult worshippers) and other revelers -- including Druids, pagans, hippies, locals, and tourists -- showed up, according to English Heritage which operates the site.

More than 400,000 others around the world watched a livestream. “This morning was a joyous and peaceful occasion with the most beautiful sunrise," said Richard Dewdney, head of operations at Stonehenge. “It is fantastic to see Stonehenge continuing to enchant and connect people.”

Stonehenge was built [and constantly re-adjusted] in stages 5,000 years ago on the flat lands of Salisbury Plain approximately 75 miles (120 kilometers) southwest of London.

The Sky People built mound-pyramids to the sun

[A few decades ago modern cranes and equipment were used to set up a pile of fallen stones, aligning them to their current positions; those photos were then forgotten, though they still exist, and everyone assumes ancient Druids built what is seen today 5,000 years ago before modern explorers stumbled onto the site. The walk from the carpark to the erected stones used to be lined with sandwich boards explaining the artificial evolution of the site with many adjustments over time, not one permanent setup millennia earlier.]

The unique stone circle was erected in the late Neolithic period about 2,500 B.C. Sunrise at Stonehenge draws druids, pagans and revelers to celebrate the summer solstice

• Cave painting in South Africa captures 280-million-year-old extinct animal, leaves researchers in awe