Astronomical Observations from the Temple of the Sun

Abstract

During the solstices, equinox, zenith and nadir passages over the past four years, the authors observed distinctive patterns of sunlight inside the Temple of the Sun at Palenque. This article describes the recorded phenomena in detail and presents new evidence on the astronomical orientation of the temple. The second section puts forth a possible methodology for the architectural layout and design of the Temple of the Sun. The geometric proportions and angles of the temple appear to correspond with the astronomical alignments of the temple. The final section discusses astronomical references in the text and in the iconography of the Tablet of the Sun.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.