This summer, the Discovery Center took our monthly guest speaker series online. Our educator Dave McDonald kicked off our virtual Super Stellar Friday back in June, with his presentation on the summer solstice. In July, our Membership and Volunteer Coordinator, Katie Marinoff, put her math degree to use by talking about the Pythagorean theorem, and in August, our Education Director, Mirka Zapletal, shared her doctoral research on carnivores along the Louisiana coast.

People have always been fascinated with the world around us and the cycles it goes through, and one of the most famous examples of that is Stonehenge. Stonehenge is an ancient monument in England, and it consists on a ring of large standing stones. There are around 160 of these stones, each about 13 feet high and 7 feet wide.

For decades, archaeologists and historians have debated why Stonehenge was built, but there’s no denying that there is a relationship between the seasons and this prehistoric site. Every year, on both the winter and summer solstices, thousands of people gather at Stonehenge to watch the sunrise. On the days of the solstices, the path of the Sun lines up with the stones, suggesting that the ancient people who built this monument may have had some sort of ritual relating to the changing of the seasons.

Today, we’re challenging you to recreate a scale model of this engineering marvel!

This Saturday—June 20, 2020—marks the official beginning of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, with the occurrence of the June solstice. In celebration, we’re focusing this week’s Distance Learning offerings on seasons. Today we’ll revisit a previous lesson about what causes the Earth’s seasons—with bonus content added to focus on the solstices!