The first “major lunar shutdown” in nearly 20 years is scheduled for this weekend

This year marks the first “grand lunar standstill” since 2006, when the moon’s path moves higher in the sky – appearing to people on Earth to have stopped.

This event, also known as the “lunistic,” occurs when the tilts of both the Earth and the Moon are at their maximum and will coincide with the summer solstice on Friday night, June 21 in the Northern Hemisphere.

On that day, the Moon will set and rise at its most northeastern and most northwestern points, making it appear longer in the night sky.

Major moon landings have historically been highly anticipated events, as structures such as England’s Stonehenge and both America’s Chimney Rock and Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks line up perfectly with the moon in the night sky.

Some sky watchers will be tracking the celestial event from Stonehenge, and several archaeologists plan to test whether the ancient site was built to coincide with the rare lunar event.

And similar spectacles associated with indigenous monuments in the US will take place during these lunistic months at Chimney Rock in Colorado, at Hopewell Sites in Ohio and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.

While the local high points for the Moon’s major standstill will vary depending on your location around the globe and nighttime weather conditions, there is a chance that there will be visibility two nights a month between now and November 2025.

The moon can appear to rise and set at different points on the horizon due to the angles of its orbit and the tilt of the Earth’s axis.

While our entire solar system is essentially flat and most planets, dwarf planets and asteroids orbit in a flat plane or disk called the ecliptic, the Moon’s orbit comes in at a slightly different angle.

As the Earth rotates along an axis offset 23.4 degrees from this ecliptic plane, our Moon’s orbit is tilted only 5.1 degrees relative to the ecliptic.

As a result, the Moon’s sunrise and sunset points, and thus how much of the Earth passes between them, can vary by 57 degrees depending on the year.

The moon’s great quiescence marks the most extreme of its range: The moon will rise at its highest northeast point and set at its highest northwest point—and also rise at its most southeast point and set at its most southwest point.

The Archaeoastronomical Database has created an interactive spreadsheet, video tutorial, and short fact sheet on what evenings in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres will enjoy the most extreme moments of great lunar stagnation, based on the perspective of their longitude and latitude.

But the key summer dates you’ll want to remember if you live in the US or elsewhere in the northern hemisphere are the 21st-22nd. June, July 19 and August 15.

These are the main times when the main lunar lunation will coincide with either a full moon or a phase of the moon that is large and bright enough to enjoy as opposed to an obscured full moon.

Those who live near Ohio may want to check out the lunistic this Friday at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, where it will be aligned with mounds built thousands of years ago by Native Americans who lived in the Chillicothe region.

This “once-in-a-generation event,” park officials noted, will help the visiting public imagine how the Hopewell people “used their deep knowledge of astronomy to align these geometric patterns with the endless cycles of the Sun and Moon as they traveled back. and beyond along the horizon.’

According to the U.S. Forest Service, which manages lands around Chimney Rock in Colorado, the summer solstice lunatic will not be visible this weekend when it passes over these long, tall national monuments in person.

“The Forest Service and partners are discussing opportunities to share this event through other platforms such as live streaming, photography and/or video recording in 2024-2025,” federal officials said in a fact sheet.

“The original Puebloans of Chimney Rock,” the service noted, “would see the risings of the moon gradually shift each year. In time they would notice that at the northernmost point of their journey of many years, a full moon would rise between the rock pillars.’

The service said that despite this historic value, the area will be closed these evenings due to safety concerns, including “potential encounters with wildlife such as bears, mountain lions, rattlesnakes.”

But those near Stonehenge in the UK won’t face similar restrictions.

Thousands of tourists will head to Stonehenge in the English countryside this weekend for the summer solstice and lunar eclipse, including some scientists.

A project to investigate Stonehenge’s connection to the Great Lunar Stagnation is being led by experts from the Universities of Oxford, Leicester and Bournemouth.

Dr Fabio Silva, assistant professor of archaeological modeling at Bournemouth University, said the moon will be in eclipse with the ancient ‘Station Stones’ of Stonehenge during the Great Lunar Stagnation.

Although only two still stand, the station stones marked the corners of a perfect rectangle with a central point at the exact center of the monument.

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One side of this rectangle appears to point in a southeasterly direction, which corresponds to where the Moon will rise during the Great Lunar Stagnation.

“We want to assess whether this is likely to be an accident or whether it was deliberate,” Dr Silva told MailOnline in April this year.

“So we want to assess where to stand, how many people could effectively witness the alignment, whether the moon will be obscured by other rocks after sunrise/before sunset that can soften the experience, whether the moonlight casts shadows inside the circle,” explained Dr. Silva.

“These are the things that together can help us make an argument for or against these alignments,” the archaeologist said.

Stonehenge was deliberately built to align with the sun at the solstices, according to English Heritage, which manages the site.

He explains: “At Stonehenge on the summer solstice, the sun rises behind the Heel Stone in the northeastern part of the horizon and its first rays shine into the heart of Stonehenge.

“Watchers at Stonehenge on the winter solstice, standing at the entrance to the enclosure and facing the center of the stones, can watch the sunset in the southwestern part of the horizon.”

Identifying whether the site was built in part to mark lunistics could help advance one theory of why the megalith was built: as a gigantic stone calendar.

Professor Timothy Darvill, an archaeologist from Bournemouth University, thinks Stonehenge served as an ancient solar calendar to help people keep track of the days of the year.

The British researcher behind the theory believes that Stonehenge’s large sandstone slabs, called sarsens, represented every single day of the month, making the entire site a giant timekeeping device.

But the theory is still hotly debated, with some archaeologists and other academics describing it as “completely unsubstantiated” and based on “forced interpretations, numerology and baseless analogies”.