Southwest Montana Astronomical Society will present a talk by Dr. Ivy Merriot, “The Dance of Stars Above the Big Horn Medicine Wheel,” on Friday, February 10th at The Commons, 1794 E. Baxter Ln., beginning at 7pm.
This presentation is free and open to the public. The Big Horn Medicine Wheel, an eighty-foot circle of stones at nearly 10,000 feet in the mountains of Wyoming has long been known to “point” to the Sun on the morning of the longest day of the year. Ivy Merriot, PhD will share her current research on astronomical medicine wheels, showing how these wheels mirror the stars above, giving us an enduring, accurate, and cosmo-tuned method of marking time and tracking cosmic events. The Wheel’s mirroring of the sky above creates a dynamic star chart you can walk inside of, like the holographic map room in Star Trek. With a skywatcher’s skill-set, any visible celestial object can be studied over time from this type of astronomical Wheel, the Sun, Moon, planets, comets, asteroids, etc. The stone design of these astronomical medicine wheels make them instruments as useful in visual astronomy today as they were five thousand years ago. The Southwest Montana Astronomical Society (SMAS) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the study of the universe for recreational and scientific purposes, and promoting interest in amateur astronomy. Learn more at www.smasweb.org/. •
