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Avebury & the Marlborough Downs
Astronomy Constants and the Avebury Landscape? Perhaps.
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Who has accurate GPS readings for the Avebury monumental landscape?

A recent inquiry led to assessing geospatial ordering of several Neolithic long barrows on the British Isle. The two largest, near Avebury, West Kennet Long Barrow and East Kennet Long Barrow, are 340-350 feet long and up to 100-120 feet wide and 20 feet high. I was surprised by how accurately the arc distance between their centerpoints (wkelb-ekelb) presented the value of days per lunar orbit, an astronomical constant.

The Avebury to Silbury Hill arc (avebu-silhi) is nearly the same length as that between these two largest of long barrows and also presents an astronomical constant, lunar anomalistic period. The anomalistic lunar period is 27.5545 days and sidereal lunar orbit is 27.32166 days. The slight difference between the two arcs is about 12 meters difference. Dividing circumference (cir) by these constants times 1,000 equals the arcs.

avebu-silhi = 0.013070° = 0.000992 C27, = cir / 27,545
Anomalistic period = S5 = 27.55455 days

wkelb-ekelb = 0.013178 = 0.001000 C27, = cir / 27,319
Sidereal orbit = S7 = 27.32167 days

Equivalent arcs and actual distances:

cir/ 1000 S5 = 1,452.8 m
avebu - silhi = 1,453.3 m

wkelb - ekelb = 1,465.3 m
cir / 1,000 S7 = 1,465.1 m

Of course, move a coordinate a few meters, and accuracy lessens. Nonetheless, I find this difficult to just ignore, and now I have a question. Who has accurate GPS readings for the Avebury monumental landscape? I wonder, Will these hold up with higher accuracy assured coordinates or survey?

More: Applications, coordinates, code, articles:
http://www.jqjacobs.net/astro/archaeogeodesy/

Avebury Arcs placemarks in a Google Earth file:
http://www.jqjacobs.net/archaeo/sites/avebury_arcs.kmz


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Posted by archaeo
26th December 2007ce
19:20

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