MIThenge is happening this afternoon at MIT’s Infinite Corridor.
As viewed from a stationary point on the earth, the path of the sun through the sky is roughly a circle which moves north and south as the seasons go by. In mid-November and in late January every year, the circular path crosses the axis of MIT’s Infinite Corridor, which runs a distance of 825 feet (251 meters) from the main entrance on Massachusetts Avenue through Buildings 7, 3, 10, 4 and 8. When this happens, the setting sun can be seen from the far end of the corridor. By analogy with Stonehenge, this phenomenon is sometimes called “MIThenge”. (The same cannot be seen at sunrise because the other end of the infinite corridor is blocked by Building 18.)
Additional taggy goodness: MIT, MIThenge, Geeks
2 comments
Alan Eliasen says:
Jan 31, 2005
I’ve been playing with MIThenge predictions for the last year or more, and I’ve come to believe that there’s an error in the posted figures for the azimuth of the corridor. This leads to up to a 2-day error in the predictions.
The upshot of this is that you can probably still get a peek at (part of) the sun on Feb. 1, if you observe from the corner of the hallway. Looking west toward the sun, you’ll want to be in the bottom left corner of the stairwell on the third floor.
For more about the predictions, historical analysis of anomalous photographs, moon predictions, and more, I have improved predictions at:
http://futureboy.homeip.net/frinkdocs/LL4.html#MIThengePredictions
including programs (written in my programming language Frink:
http://futureboy.homeip.net/frinkdocs/ )
By the way, am I stupid or does this thing lose all paragraphs? The world becomes really hard to interptet crammed together into one big paragraph.
Sooz says:
Feb 1, 2005
Hey Alan,
Thanks for the tidbits!
Sorry about the comment page weirdness. You’re the second person to note something weird. I really need to tinker with the default templates. It looks like the “preview comments” page does not accurately show what appears on the actual comments. Oops!