The Irish Node of IYA2009 and the Office of Public Works in Ireland are inviting you to join in watching a live webcast of the winter solstice sunrise on December 21st from the megalithic passage tomb of Newgrange, in County Meath, Ireland.
This Webcast will be live from 08.30 to 09.30 GMT on December 21st. The sunrise is at ~08.55 GMT (8.55 am in UK and Ireland).
Send us your comments on the event!
image courtesy The Office of Public Works, Ireland photograph by Cyril Byrne, courtesy of The Irish Times
Professor Mike Redfern, Chair and Single Point of Contact for the all-Ireland IYA2009 activities, and Director of Astronomy, NUI Galway, gives us more details:
"Newgrange is an extremely well-preserved and very large megalithic monument dating from about 5,000 years ago, dated from both the archaeological and astronomical evidence. A corballed inner chamber within the mound, with many beautiful decorated stones, lies at the end of an 18m downwards sloping tunnel. On each winter solstice for the past 5,000 years the first rays of the rising Sun would have passed through a specially constructed aperture (the roof box) above the entrance. Today these rays fall on the floor of the inner chamber at the foot of a decorated stone, but 5,000 years ago the actual stone would have been illuminated. Newgrange is the oldest megalithic monument in the world with a known astronomical function, and it predates the better-known Stonehenge in the neighbouring island of Great Britain by more than a thousand years.
When Newgrange was built, megalithic astronomers set out the dimensions and positions of the various components, (of the roof box, passage, inner chamber etc.), before the mound was built, with extraordinary precision. Angles are correctly defined to within a small fraction of a degree. The archaeologists talk (fancifully I think) about various ritual functions, and certainly the recent complete excavation showed that the inner chamber was the repository of cremated human remains. They speculate that the Sun's rays at midwinter sunrise served to connect the worlds of the living and the dead, but I prefer to think of it as an astronomical observatory, which it certainly was, built to determine the end of the old year and the start of the new one.
At some unknown time in the past, the passage was blocked and the function of the observatory lost - although, strangely, local folklore tells of the midwinter sunrise entering the mound. It was rediscovered when the mound was excavated in the 1960s and since that time a small number of observers have been in the chamber each year to observe the event.
I was there a few years ago and it is very moving experience - one can not help but think of our remote ancestors 250 generations ago doing the same thing."
Official press releases:
Minister Martin Mansergh announces collaboration with International Year of Astronomy on webcast of 2008 Newgrange Winter Solstice