First ‘great lunar standstill’ in decades, matching the June solstice

This year marks the first ‘great lunar standstill’ since 2006, when the moon’s path travels higher in the sky – to people on the ground it appears to be standing still.

Also known as the ‘lunistice’, this event occurs when the tilt of both the Earth and the moon is at maximum and will overlap with the summer solstice on Friday evening, June 21, in the Northern Hemisphere.

On that day, the moon will rise and set at its northeastern and northwesternmost points, making it appear longer in the night sky.

The great lunar standstills have been highly anticipated events throughout history, as structures such as England’s Stonehenge and both America’s Chimney Rock and Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks line up perfectly with the moon in the night sky.

Some skywatchers will view the celestial event from Stonehenge and a few archaeologists plan to test whether or not the ancient site was built in line with the rare lunar event.

And similar spectacles associated with native monuments in the U.S. will take place during these lunistice months at Chimney Rock in Colorado, the Hopewell Sites in Ohio, and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.

While local highs for the Great Lunar Standstill will vary based on your location around the world and nighttime weather conditions, there is a chance of visibility two nights per month from now until November 2025.

The moon appears to rise and set at different points on the horizon due to the angles of its orbit and the tilt of the Earth’s axis.

Although our entire solar system is essentially flat and the majority of planets, dwarf planets and asteroids orbit in a flat plane or disk called the ecliptic, the moon’s orbit comes at a slightly different angle.

While the Earth rotates along an axis tilted 23.4 degrees to this ecliptic plane, our moon’s orbit is only 5.1 degrees to the ecliptic.

The result is that the moon’s rising and setting points, and therefore the part of the Earth it crosses between them, can vary by 57 degrees depending on the year.

A major lunar standstill marks the most extreme of its range: the moon will rise at its highest northeastern point and set at its very highest northwestern point – and it will also rise at its southeasternmost point and set at its southwesternmost point.

The Archaeoastronomy Database has built an interactive spreadsheet calculator, a video tutorial, and a shorter fact sheet on which evenings in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres will enjoy the most extreme moments of the Great Lunar Standstill, based on the perspective from their latitude and longitude.

But the most important summer dates you’ll want to remember if you live in the US or elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere are June 21-22, July 19, and August 15.

These are the key times when the great lunar standstill will overlap with a full moon or a phase of the moon that is big and bright enough to enjoy, as opposed to an eclipsed full moon.

Those who live near Ohio may want to view the lunistice this Friday at the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, where it will join the earthen mounds created thousands of years ago by the Native Americans who lived in the Chillicothe region.

This “one-time event,” park officials noted, will help the visiting public visualize how the Hopewell people “used their deep knowledge of astronomy to align these geometric figures with the endless cycles of the sun and moon as they travel back’. and further along the horizon.’

According to the US Forest Service, which manages the land around Chimney Rock in Colorado, the lunistice will not be visible if you personally walk through these long, tall national monuments during this weekend’s summer solstice.

“The Forest Service and partners are discussing options to share the event through other platforms, such as livestreaming, photography and/or video recording in 2024-2025,” federal officials noted in a fact sheet.

“The Ancestral Puebloans of Chimney Rock,” the agency noted, “would have seen the moonrise gradually shift each year. In time they would have noticed that at the northernmost point of its multi-year journey the full moon would rise between the rock pillars.’

The agency said that despite this historic value, the area would be closed on these evenings due to safety concerns, including “potential encounters with wildlife such as bears, mountain lions and rattlesnakes.”

But similar restrictions will not apply to those near Stonehenge in Britain.

Thousands of tourists will flock to Stonehenge in the English countryside this weekend due to the overlap of the summer solstice and lunistice, including some scientists.

A project to investigate Stonehenge’s link with the Great Lunar Standstill is being led by experts from the universities of Oxford, Leicester and Bournemouth.

Dr. Fabio Silva, senior lecturer in archaeological modeling at Bournemouth University, said that during the great lunar standstill the moon will align with the ancient ‘Station Stones’ of Stonehenge.

Although only two are still standing, the Station Stones marked the corners of a perfect rectangle with the central point right in the middle of the monument.

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One of the sides of this rectangle appears to point southeast, which corresponds to where the moon will rise during a major lunar standstill.

‘We want to assess whether this is likely to be a coincidence or whether it was deliberate,’ Dr Silva told MailOnline last April.

‘So we want to assess where to stand, how many people can actually witness the alignment, whether the moon will be obscured after rising/before sunset by other stones that could diminish the experience, whether the moonlight will cast shadows within the circle, ‘Dr. Silva explained.

“These are the things that, taken together, can help us build an argument for or against these similarities,” the archaeologist said.

According to English Heritage, which manages the site, Stonehenge was purposely built to align with the sun during the solstices.

It explains: ‘At Stonehenge, on the summer solstice, the sun rises behind the Heel Stone in the northeastern part of the horizon and its first rays shine into the heart of Stonehenge.

‘Observers at Stonehenge during the winter solstice, while standing in the entrance to the enclosure and looking towards the center of the stones, can see the sun setting in the southwestern part of the horizon.’

Identifying whether or not the site was built in part to mark the lunistice could help advance a theory as to why the megalith was built: as a giant stone calendar.

Professor Timothy Darvill, an archaeologist at Bournemouth University, thinks Stonehenge served as an ancient solar calendar, allowing people to track the days of the year.

The British researcher behind the theory thinks that Stonehenge’s large sandstone slabs, called sarsens, each represented a single day in a month, turning the entire site into a huge time-keeping device.

But the theory is still hotly debated, with some archaeologists and other academics describing it as ‘completely unfounded’ and based on ‘forced interpretations, numerology and unsupported analogies’.