Monday, February 04, 2008

Piles arranged in lines around a central feature: MilkyWay x SummerSoltice

There is a bit of a rock pile site in Carlisle Conservation Land and it may have many different purposes. Certainly each time I visit it, I bring with me the baggage of my latest assumptions and hypotheses, and so I see different things. One time at this site I was struck by the "effigy"-like quality of some of the piles. Another time I was struck by a number of piles with black/white pairs of cobbles next to each other in the pile. This last time, I went with FFC and the focus was on alignments.

[If the movie does not load, click here]

So, from a high point we look down one line of piles that are lined up in a direction related to the Milky Way (northernmost extreme rising, or something...), and another set of lined up rocks related to a different Milky Way direction (southernmost....). Meanwhile a different alignment is suggested, visible also from the same high point and running along the line of the summer solstice sunrise. Hence the idea of identifying a marker pile site by its principal aligments:
(milky way) x (summer solstice).
There is some more serious surveying to do at this site but I want to focus on one observation that may be worth of keeping track of and of being applied again at other places: one of the lines of sight, passes directly parallel with the vertical face of a rock pile. I use the word "crisp" in the video to describe one view of the vertical face. Later, another vertical face, with its suggestion of directionality, cause me to look down along that direction and spot a prominent pile. So there might be a small drop of truth here.

We have puzzled over why some piles seem to have a clean vertical face on one side only. Now the suggestion is that this might be to make the viewing direction "crisp" from one direction. This means, look along the line parallel with the vertical face to locate viewing positions.

2 comments :

theseventhgeneration said...

I like this idea. It helps clarify some sites here in NY where I've looked at all the piles (together) for a pattern, and nothing emerges. Just looking back at my photos, I think there's truth to this idea. This is a good time of year for me to go back to some of those sites and look for a "crisp" viewing direction.

Anonymous said...

Thinking some more about it, when the "crisp" face is actually slanted, rather than true vertical, then something that moves diagonally (in the sky) is suggested. The hint give us an idea which part of the sky to examine.