And there's a-- in so many of our celebrations, when we peel back the specifics of time and place, there is a real, tangible, scientific phenomenon. Solstice and Equinox-- coming of age is a biological change.There's so much underneath that's provable and real that's worthy of celebration.
"Free Like the Birds," "Autumn's Eyes," What's next? Winter Solstice ? Yes. All right, cool. All right. So give it up for Paola, please.
to the installation of solar panels on Habitat for Humanity homes helped spread this new energy gospel. We'll do it again on the summer solstice in 2027, and this time we will do it globally. Days like this help us build the political power we need to push these things ahead.
This is what's called the analemma. So the summer solstice is at the top, winter solstice is at the bottom, the equinox-- and the reason I'm showing this is that the clock that we wanted to build, we wanted to have a way for it to not drift its timing over the course of 10,000 years.
So these monuments weren't representing the burials of the whole community. through the winter solstice alignment, you have this essentialized, captured time, if you like, within the monument.
Pepsi, everything. And I was like, if you guys give me a shot, I'll find you something. They're doing the Solstice .
Meric Long: Yeah. No. Once a month. Meric Long: Solstice . There you go. There's a restaurant called Solstice and that was my first gig.
So these monuments weren't representing the burials of the whole community. So we have the winter solstice alignment here at Newgrange, but there are other monuments that do the summer solstice alignment.
So these monuments weren't representing the burials of the whole community. It's not just winter solstice .
Meric Long: Solstice . There you go. There's a restaurant called Solstice and that was my first gig. They gave me a hundred bucks to play for two hours while people were stuffing their faces and and then I just started,
tossed out of the book. But then the sun going to the solstices -- the equinox and the solstices again-- are offset.
down, but we do know that every pile of rocks they left behind, like Stonehenge, seems to point to the equinox or the solstice . Do you not break into an involuntary grin when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and hits you on the shoulder
So these monuments weren't representing the burials of the whole community. we can be in there on the day of the winter solstice and see the sunlight coming into the monument.
Pepsi, everything. And I was like, if you guys give me a shot, I'll find you something. And we did a deal for the Pontiac Solstice .
And down below, down south there's a place called Syene, which is, if you can read the word that says tropic, it's on the Tropic of Cancer. And that means that that, on the summer solstice in Syene, the sun would have been overhead. So that is what he used to measure the earth.
And there in Alexandria there's a column. Now when the sun is directly overhead in Syene on the summer solstice , the column casts no shadow. The sun shines directly down a web shaft-- a web shaft-- a well shaft, whereas in the same day, in Alexandria, there is a shadow that's being cast.
So these monuments weren't representing the burials of the whole community. Another area that they were concerned with seems to be not only the winter solstice , but the turning seasons.
When you actually start applying it to menus-- Halloween is a pagan holiday. It's the harvest. Winter solstice is-- even like I started paying attention to history and food and holidays. Everything started making sense through food.
There are extra days at the end that you have to correct for things. So you can't actually predict on what day the equinox or the solstice or anything like that would occur. And this required then a process called intercalation, which just means throwing stuff in the middle of the calendar.
And we do a sort of secular Christmas with my husband's grandparents. But what we also do is, on the night of the winter solstice -- not in a woo-woo way, but we just say, look. Tomorrow, the days are going to start getting longer again.
And these were the overriding questions that I had at that time. So most of you that have been to Newgrange will know that it's famous for its winter solstice orientations. On the shortest day of the year, the sunlight comes down into the monument, but not through the entrance area here as you'd
So these monuments weren't representing the burials of the whole community. Here, we have an enormous amount of data through the winter solstice alignment, through the art, and through the bones of the dead that's
Pepsi, everything. And I was like, if you guys give me a shot, I'll find you something. And I got them to agree to let us shoot the video with one of our music video directors, and we would make a music video with the Pontiac Solstice