On Tuesday night, thousands of people flocked to the city that never sleeps to try and get the perfect shot of the elusive “Manhattanhenge” natural phenomena. The twice-yearly event occurs in New York when the Sun perfectly lines up with the grid of streets in Manhattan. According to the American Museum of Natural History, Manhattanhenge occurs twice in May and twice in July, and on these two days, as the sun sets on the grid, half of the disc is above and half is below the horizon.
The phrase “Manhattanhenge” was first coined in 1997 by astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson
The “henge” phenomenon is not unique to New York; reports of comparable events have been made in other large cities with a lot of skyscrapers and straight, long streets, like Chicago, Montreal, and Toronto. According to the BBC, there is a dawn variation that takes place in the winter, around three weeks before and three weeks after the summer solstice. The phrase “Manhattanhenge” was first coined in 1997 by astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson. The alignment of the sun with concentric circles of vertical stones at Stonehenge on each of the solstices served as inspiration for him. The sunset is forecasted to take place again on July 11 and 12.Â
