World Cup :- Uruguay v GERMANY (Play-Off)
Published on 10 Jul 2010 at 00:00.
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Saturday 10th July 2010
World Cup today :- Uruguay v GERMANY (Play-Off)
Oldest Observatory discovered in Germany
In a wheat field near Goseck, Germany lies a vast circle, the remains of an ancient observatory built 7,000 years ago: the oldest known attempts of humans to understand the universal. Built two millenia before Stonehenge, around 4900 BC, it is believed that Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples used it to measure the heavens. If so, it proves humans were sky watchers much earlier than we previously thought.
The circle is 75 meters (225 feet) wide and was spotted by airplane. Originally it consisted of four concentric circles, a mound, ditch and two wooden palisades about five feet tall. In the palisades stood three sets of gates facing southeast, southwest and north. On the winter solstice, from the center of the circles you could see the Sun rise and set through the southern gates.
Another discovery was a bronze disk discovered nearby which dates from 1600BC – this disk is called the Nebra disk, the roughly 12 inch diameter bronze disk is the oldest realistic representation of the universe yet found. It depicts a crescent moon, a circle (probably a full moon) a cluster of seven stars (likely the Pleiades) and scattered other stars. An angle on the disk corresponds with the 100 degree span between the solstice gates at the observatory.
Also on the disk is three arcs in gold leaf. The two opposing arcs running along the rim are 82.5 degrees long and mark the Sun’s position at sunrise/sunset. The lowest points of the two arcs are 97.5 degrees apart depicting sunrise/sunset on the winter solstice in Germany at that time. Likewise, the uppermost points mark sunrise/sunset on the summer solstice.
