The town was the last and largest, and by far the most resolutely modern, of the postwar new towns – though it has some surprisingly romantic features, such as the alignment of Midsummer Boulevard, and the shopping centre itself, with the sunrise on the summer solstice.
This was not a practice run for the winter solstice, when the setting sun will glow orange through the site's biggest trilithon, a vast staple-shaped assemblage.
Imagine a pre-historic class of political pundit, the members of which firmly believed that the carrying out of winter solstice rituals was absolutely necessary to bring about the return of summer.
Because the street grid is not strictly laid out to true north, Manhattanhenge takes place around May 28th and again around July 11th, each date roughly three weeks before and after the summer solstice.
Favourite among his Jack tales (told at Harvard and the Smithsonian, as well as all over the Grampians) was one where, at the 50-year solstice, all the trees of the Old Road danced.
SINCE the mid-1990s people in Yulin, a city in the southern region of Guangxi, have gathered on the summer solstice (June 21st this year) to drink lychee wine and savour dog.
And the Indian government's refusal to allow Ogyen Trinley to enter Sikkim has become a political issue: the state is littered with posters demanding he be allowed in.In a ceremony for the winter solstice at the mountaintop monastery of Rumtek itself, drums throb, horns and conches low mournfully, and monks led by a cleric in elaborate robes and a huge black hat consign an offering to the bonfire.
The original gave a potted history of astronomy back to the time of Eratosthenes, a Greek mathematician who correctly inferred the circumference of the Earth in 200BC by measuring the shadows cast by sticks on the summer solstice in Alexandria and Syene (now Aswan).
Ms Mori seeks new ways to express these ideas, using science, emerging technologies and contemporary synthetic materials as well as more traditional media.The exhibition is timed to coincide with the winter solstice, which some take to be the end of the Mayan calendar and the start of a new era.
His new film "Una lunga, lunga, lunga notte d'amore" ("A Long, Long, Long Night of Love") is neo-realism revisited, repeating the formula some 50 years later, with half a dozen stories interacting over the longest night of the year, the winter solstice.
NEXT week 24m Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Finns and Icelanders will celebrate the summer solstice, a time of midnight sun.
