March – Winter Lecture Series

Join us for our March Winter Lecture by one of our club members – Ivy Merriot, free and open to the public. Hagar Auditorium at the Museum of the Rockies, short SMAS club meeting following the lecture.

March 30, 2012: Archaeoastronomy of the Big Horn Medicine Wheel – Ivy Merriot

The Big Horn Medicine Wheel rests at nearly 10,000 ft in Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains, only a few miles from the Montana border. It is a federally recognized Historic Landmark and Sacred Site although no indigenous people claim to have built it or have knowledge of when it was built. Forty years ago, solstice and stellar alignments embodied in the Big Horn Medicine Wheel were discovered by the solar physicist John Eddy, who then used these alignments to date the wheel’s origin. His results were published in the research journal Science in 1974. Recognition of this American “Stonehenge” caused a world-wide stir in the popular media with major newspapers and National Geographic taking notice. In 2012, evidence suggests this ”observatory” continues to track and predict astronomical changes through time.