The Astronomy of Stonehenge

Guest Speaker

Thursday, 28th August 2025 (19:45 - 22:00)

Venue: Hybrid

Across the vast swathe of interstellar space exist long streaks of organic material of uncertain origin and even less certain composition. Astronomers have been studying these “diffuse interstellar bands”, or DIBs, for decades and recent discoveries have provided new clues to what they are made of. Now, astronomers have found them all around the Solar System. And that’s quite surprising.
The Solar System is located in the so-called Local Bubble, a cavity in the interstellar medium (ISM). It’s a region 300 light-years across with a density of about one-tenth of the regular ISM. It contains a lot of hot gas, heated to millions of degrees, creating conditions too harsh for your standard interstellar molecules.

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Speaker: Simon Banton

My name's Simon Banton and I'm fascinated by humanity's long obsession with the sky. I've been an amateur astronomer since I was 7 years old and in the early 1990s I started to take an interest in ancient monuments that seemed to embody this obsession in their design.

There's a word for this - archaeoastronomy.

In 2005 I moved to Wiltshire to be closer to Stonehenge - a monument that everyone seems to know is aligned in some way to the movement of the Sun. I wanted the opportunity to study it more frequently than by the occasional visit or through coming to the dawn open access events at the solstices and equinoxes.

Stonehenge and its environs quickly turned from a keen hobby into a passion and I began volunteering for English Heritage as part of their Education team, meeting school parties and giving them a rundown on the history of the monument so their visits became more than simply a school trip to a pile of rocks in a field.

That turned into a full time paid job as a Historic Property Steward for 6 years, explaining the theories and current state of knowledge to some of the more than 1 million visitors that come to Stonehenge every year.

As an independent researcher I often found myself searching in vain for particular resources online - and the genesis of this website - the Stones of Stonehenge - was the failure to find anything that had a photo of every stone at Stonehenge taken from every angle.

A companion website - the Stonehenge Barrow Map - was born of the lack of a single resource that cross-referenced the burial mounds in the Stonehenge environs against their various data sources in a map format.

Sky at Night filming at Stonehenge

I have a career background in software and Internet technologies so, on the basis that no-one else was likely to build exactly what I needed, I decided to do them myself.

These days I no longer work for the organisation that's tasked with caring for Stonehenge and instead I'm focused on writing articles about Stonehenge and doing guided tours of the landscape and the monument.