![]() ![]() This rectilinear grid design runs from north of Houston Street in Lower Manhattan to south of 155th Street (Manhattan) in Upper Manhattan. Thus, when the azimuth for sunset is 299° (i.e., 29° north of due West), the sunset aligns with the streets on that grid. In accordance with the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, the street grid for most of Manhattan is rotated 29° clockwise from true east-west. I named that Manhattanhenge, sort of harkening back to my early days thinking about the alignment of the sun and structures that we might build." and that stuck with me, which is why I named this phenomenon in Manhattan where the sun sets along the street grid. I visited Stonehenge as a kid at age 15 on an expedition that was the expedition head. In a later interview, Tyson stated that he coined the term, and that it was inspired by a childhood visit to Stonehenge on an expedition headed by Gerald Hawkins, an astronomer who was the first to propose Stonehenge's purpose as an ancient astronomical observatory used to predict movements of sun and stars, as outlined in his 1965 book Stonehenge Decoded. The phenomenon (but not the term "Manhattanhenge") was described by Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History and a native New Yorker in 1997 in the magazine Natural History. The term Manhattanhenge is a reference to Stonehenge, a prehistoric monument located in Wiltshire, England, which was constructed so that the rising sun, seen from the center of the monument at the time of the summer solstice, aligns with the outer " Heel Stone". ![]()
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