April 8, 1998
On your birthday, photons that left distant stars before humans walked the Earth finally completed their journey. You began yours.
Nabta: Older than Stonehenge
Birthday · April 8, 1998
A little universe, just for you
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APOD published April 8, 1998. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
In the Sahara Desert in Egypt lie the oldest known astronomically aligned stones in the world: Nabta. Over one thousand years before the creation of Stonehenge, local herders built a stone circle and other structures on the shoreline of a lake that has long since dried up. Over 6000 years ago, stone slabs three meters high were dragged over a kilometer to create the site. Shown above is one of the stones that remains. Little is known about the ultimate purpose of Nabta and the nature of the people who built it.