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Southerly Major Lunar Standstill

 
Lundy, Isle of Avalon Stonehenge Stonehenge Pictures  Mystic Realms Shoppe

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Summer solstice; the Southerly Major Lunar Standstill alignment. Comparisons between Lundy Island and Stonehenge.

 

Equinox and Solstice

The points of intersection of the Ecliptic and the celestial equator  are called the nodes or more commonly the equinoxes. Currently the vernal, or spring, equinox occurs around the 21st of March. The autumnal equinox occurs around the 23rd of September. Midway between the equinoxes are the winter solstice around the 22nd of December and the summer solstice, the 21st of June. ( Solstice means 'sun stands still' )
Because the equator and the ecliptic rotate in opposite directions to each other the position of the equinoxes on the ecliptic moves about one degree every seventy years. ( It takes 25,868 years for the ecliptic and the celestial equator to return to the same relative positions). 

 

Lunar Standstill

"At what is called the Major Lunar Standstill, the moon reaches its maximum northern and southern rising points on the horizon. Solstices of a kind, though this analogy is not really accurate. In the year of a major standstill it is the winter full moon which achieves the northerly rising extreme, and the summer full moon the southerly extreme. Also in a major standstill year, the arc of the moon across the sky can vacillate quite rapidly between being very high at times, to little more than skimming the horizon at others — a very dramatic and noticeable phenomenon, especially at higher latitudes. This is because in a single month in a Major Standstill year the moon’s orbit carries it well above and well below the ecliptic.
"At the Minor Standstill year, nine years and a few months later, the winter full moon rises as far south of the midsummer sun rise Position as it ever does while the midsummer full moon rises as far north of the midwinter sunrise position as it can. So the spread of the horizon between rising and setting positions is the narrowest that occurs." - Devereux
 
 
Summer Solstice
from Lundy
Yes Tor, the highest point on Dartmoor lies on a bearing of 140.37 . 

 
From Stonehenge 139.4 - 140.7 
Big Map
stone 93 - stone 92

 

Clovelly Dykes hillfort lies on a bearing of 139.4 from Lundy. 

 
 Continued to the south east this line seems to cross Guernsey and Jersey, the Channel Islands, and also Mont St. Michel in Brittany.
To the north west from Lundy this line crosses Mt. Leinster in the south eastern corner of Ireland.

beacons

 
 
The southerly major lunar standstill from Lundy coincides with  Yes Tor on Dartmoor
Again these are both beacons and
"significant inland vantage points" .

 

"Thom deduced that the Major Standstill southerly midsummer moonrise would Occur behind Figsbury Ring, an Iron Age hilifort six and a half miles (10.5 km) southeast of Stonehenge, and would set behind Chain Hill to the southwest. Aubrey Burl comments:    Thom suggested that at these places foresights had been constructed so that people might record and analyse the moon’s movements from Stonehenge, but in this he was probably    mistaken. What matters is that if Stonehenge observers had aligned posts on these positions and then marked the midway point between them they would have produced a line less than 10 from True South, a line, moreover, looking towards Rox Hill, once Rocks Hill, two and a quarter miles (3.6 km) away and a convenient landmark for ‘catching’ the moon on its path across the night sky."  -Devereux
"Burl further comments that the original axis of Phase I Stone­henge had actually been directed at the rising of the major stand­still midwinter full moon, thus making the fundamental cosmological line at the site originally lunar, not solar. Later, when the axis was altered almost five degrees, a solar orientation was created" - Devereux

Clovelly Dykes 

Yes Tor

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