Manhattanhenge will light up crosstown traffic tonight (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
SUNSET ON THE MANHATTAN GRID
East side of Manhattan
Tuesday, May 29, 8:17 pm
Thursday, July 12, 8:25 pm
Admission: free
www.haydenplanetarium.org
manhattanhenge may 30 slideshow
One of our favorite events of the summer season, the first of two Manhattanhenges occurs tonight around 8:17, when the sun will align with Manhattan’s off-center (by thirty degrees) grid to send spectacular bursts of sunlight streaming across the streets. Coined by master astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson in 2002, Manhattanhenge takes place twice a year; for 2012, those dates are May 29 and July 12, when the sun will create “a radiant glow of light across Manhattan’s brick and steel canyons, simultaneously illuminating both the north and south sides of every cross street of the borough’s grid,” Tyson explains on the planetarium website. “A rare and beautiful sight. These two days happen to correspond with Memorial Day and Baseball’s All Star break. Future anthropologists might conclude that, via the Sun, the people who called themselves Americans worshiped War and Baseball.” Photographers will once again line up along the city’s wider thoroughfares on the east side, including Twenty-third, Thirty-fourth, Forty-second, and Fifty-seventh Sts., risking their physical safety against oncoming traffic as the try to capture that exact moment when the sun is half above the horizon, half below it. Wrongly called the Manhattan Solstice, the event “may just be a unique urban phenomenon in the world, if not the universe,” Tyson explains. It’s quite a sight; don’t miss it.