Operation Megalithic Lift - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 184

7. Operation Megalithic Lift
You know, Hawke, this thing has caught the Navy's imagina-
tion exactly .
- Sydney Jordan and Willie Patterson, 'Overland,'
Jeff Hawke , Daily Express, 1966-1967 [ 1 ] .
The theoretical alignments still had to be modified to the pre-
cise contours of the skyline. Although by Thom's standards my
design was very imprecise, with each marker stone occupying sev-
eral degrees of the field of view from the other side of the circle and
no use of distant outliers or horizon features as 'foresights,' small
differences in the elevation of the actual horizon would translate
into much bigger differences in azimuth. To pin down the solar
and lunar alignments with the accuracy found in the prehistoric
sides must have required years of patient observation (decades at
least for the lunar standstills), using prominent features on the dis-
tant horizon as 'foresights,' with teams of observers spread across
the landscape to pin down the exact view station with greater and
greater accuracy. To find the most northerly and southerly posi-
tions of the Moon, rising and setting, the ancient astronomers
must have refined their sight-lines over a century or more before
commemorating them in stone.
There was no question of using such methods at Sighthill,
where the site was already fixed and the timescale was only
months. But finding the actual rising and setting positions was
difficult. A lunar standstill had occurred not long before the start
of the project, so there were 9 years to wait for the next one. The
1978 midsummer solstice had passed before the site was finalized,
and the weather around the winter solstice was atrocious, so no
observations had been possible at the point when the pressure to
finalize the design came to a head.
Although we knew the answers, in theory, fitting them to the
actual skyline, allowing for parallax and refraction, was a different