Today, in the history of astronomy, the ceremonies in the Stonhenge mark Summer solstices.
The Summer Sankranti has been the site of the Summer Sankranti ceremony for Stonhenge Millennia. Credit: Andrew Dun/Wikimedia
Stonehenge, Salisbury plane, notorious stone circle on the UK, have aligned the memorial of about 2500 BCE so that if you stand at the center of the ring on summer solstice (which can be 20, 21 or 22 June), the sun rises on the stone; The solstice ceremony is believed to be there for millennium. In the 1960s, Grand Hawkins, an astronomer at Boston University, envisaged. This was a sophisticated astronomical observatory that was used to predict the eclipses. A few years later, a retired Oxford Professor Alexander Thom of Engineering claimed a desired level of astronomical accuracy in more than 900 stone circles in the British islands. Although these more extreme ideas have been rejected by archaeologists and have been debated on its exact astronomical objective, today the circle is accepted as a method of tracking the sun and moon on a large scale – although Hawkins and Thom claimed less accurately. New theories act as an ancient solar calendar, possibly for rituals or agricultural objectives. Thousands still gather in the Stonhenge to celebrate the summer solstice.
