Parque Arqueológico do Solstício
en.wikipedia.org>>On the winter solstice of December 21, the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere,[clarification needed] the shadow of one of the blocks disappears when the sun is directly above it.
This is not quite right. On that day the Sun is directly above São Paulo.
At the archaeological site: Latitude = +2.62°, Solar declination ≈ −23.44°, Difference = about 26.06°.
Therefore, at solar noon: Sun altitude ≈ 90° − 26.06° = 63.94°. Consequently, at that particular latitude, a normal vertical stone cannot have its shadow disappear because the Sun is directly overhead on December 21.
That assumes a perfectly vertical stone, which is not really indicated by the article's description of the stone placements.
Stonehenge is always mentioned as reference but you have much much older ones:
Göbekli Tepe (Turkey) ~9600 BCE Almendres Cromlech (Portugal) ~5900 BCE
I love these random appearances of Wikipedia pages on the HN front page.
I'm Brazilian, and this is the first time I've heard of this park.
Same! Somehow I had never heard of this. Will have to try and visit someday!
Also, lol @ the name of the river near that site. (For the gringos: "Rego Grande", "rego" officially means ditch/trench, but nowadays it's much more commonly used as slang for butt crack. So, it's the Large Butt Crack river. Which I guess tracks for Brazil :P)
I also love them, so I built this website:
You may also like those other articles about Brazil which were posted on HN:
Me too! I recently made this bluesky bot that finds and posts them: https://bsky.app/profile/hnwiki.bsky.social
My comment few days ago [1] now look strangely prophetic. We only need to find 3 more Stonehenges.
[stub for offtopicness]
[...submitted title "Amazon Stonehenge: Parque Arqueológico do Solstício" kind of asked for it...]
Thought this was a new AWS product for half a second.
Seems this one might have been deprecated a while ago.
Still paying for cold storage
This reminded me of when the governor of Amazonas told the press that Amazon should pay them royalties for using the state’s name
I thought maybe Amazon started sponsoring the site
Surprise bills every summer solstice
I found it to be very fascinating how names like Amazon, Alibaba, Tesla, Titanic, Mustang et al had almost crushed the original meaning that, once encountered, you instantly recognized it as a brand/product unless clear context is provided.
> Amazon Stonehenge: Diskless, Kafka Compatible Data Streaming on top of Amazon Glacier.
100% SLA