Stonehenge, rebuilt stone by stone and set moving: timdaw37.github.io/stonehenge-block-3d is a free, interactive 3D model of the monument, built from survey-locked stone positions on real LiDAR-derived ground — open it in a browser and walk around all 93 stones, or watch the sky itself move over them.
The sun and moon travel across the horizon in real time, not as a fixed marker: a time slider and "Sun's arc" / "Moon's arc" controls animate the rise, with Gleam, Half orb, and Full orb settings for exactly when a disc counts as up.
An Epoch control swings the whole sky between Modern and 2500 BC, or any year typed in. Go back to 2500 BC and the pole star marker moves too — from Polaris to Thuban — the slow wobble of the Earth's axis, not a rounding error.
A Newham mode draws the station stones' own sightlines — long sides for the moon's furthest rising and setting points, short sides for the solstice sun — as lines running through the stones themselves, with Most Northerly / Most Southerly toggles for the moon's extremes, and a readout comparing the stone-pair bearing against the live sky azimuth side by side.
A Complete view shows the monument with a theoretical complete sarsen build: every lintel in place, the fallen stones ghosted rather than erased. Terrain, orbit and top-down views, and hover-for-coordinates in both OSGB and WGS84 are built in throughout.
Source and data are open on GitHub.
Nice one Tim. Just a note to say that you are using the proleptic Gregorian calendar for prior dates, wheres programs such as Stellarium use the Julian calendar by default. I tested the Major Lunar Standstill back in -2498 and there's roughly a 3-minute difference for the date and time between Julian and proleptic Gregorian, for the same moon position, so it's entirely acceptable.
ReplyDelete