For thousands of years, humans have observed the patterns of the sun and the night sky, giving importance and meaning to their findings in many different ways. The earliest humans used no more than their naked eyes to track the activity of the sky above them. Today, scientists are able to look at areas of space billions of light years away using equipment like the Hubble Space Telescope. The evolution of these astronomical technologies was no simple feat - the development of this scientific field can be credited to a countless number of people who, over hundreds of years, spent their time straining their necks to look up at our sky.
The sun is the center of our solar system, but that does not mean that it was always central to the beliefs …show more content…
Ancient calendars kept track of significant astrological events to mark different times of the year. For agricultural societies, this was especially important. A successful harvest was dependent on starting the planting season at the right time. After years of observations and trial and error, ancient peoples were able to predict the patterns of the sun and distinguish the timing of each season. Ancient Egyptians tracked the stars and invented a calendar that would allow them to predict when the Nile would flood. One of the best examples of an early civilization that developed an elaborate calendar system is the Mayans. They had a ritual calendar composed of 13 months, with 20 days in each month, and a 365 day solar calendar (Welser-Sherrill 2007). Their calendar was impressively accurate, and it ruled many facets of Mayan life. One particularly interesting integration of the Mayan calendar is the design of the Pyramid of Kulkulkan. The square-based temple has 365 steps total, with 91 steps on each of the four sides and one shared top step to represent the days of the solar year. During equinoxes, the position of the setting sun casts shadows down the northern stairway that appear like a long slithering snake - Kulkulkan, the Feathered Serpent God (Cline). The Mayans developed numerology and mathematical understandings that were way ahead of their time, but thankfully the end of their calendar was not a …show more content…
For example, the Mayan civilization seems to be built entirely around the sky above it. Every building is aligned with bright stars and specifically oriented to face the horizon where special events like the sunrise would occur. Many structures would additionally be designed with strategically placed windows that would effectively turn it into an observatory for viewing the rising and setting of certain constellations (Welser-Sherrill 2007). Egyptian pyramids and temples were similarly oriented, sometimes in relation to constellations that were significant to farming, and other times in relation to solstices or equinoxes. One Egyptian temple, El Karnak, was built in celebration of the Egyptian sun god, Re, the ‘bringer of light’. El Karnak was realigned every few hundred years to match the movement of stars because it was also a scientific instrument used to predict the length of a year with exceptional accuracy when aligned properly