On Friday, May 29, just before sunset, crowds will gather in Midtown to watch the sun slip perfectly between Manhattan’s buildings for a biannual phenomenon known as Manhattanhenge. The spectacle lasts only a few minutes, yet it draws a level of collective attention that’s increasingly rare in a city where nature is, for many, an afterthought.
Manhattanhenge is technically “just another sunset,” says Marcel Agüeros, an astronomer and astrophysicist who teaches at Columbia University. “Our east-west grid, which isn’t perfectly east-west, is such that there are times of the year where the sun appears to be exactly aligned with the streets.” This alignment creates a striking visual: the sun appears to sit at the end of 42nd Street as the buildings that frame it glow, radiating a golden light.
For most observers, Manhattanhenge is a frenzied photo-op. But Agüeros hopes it can mean more. In a city where most people only notice the sky in relation to buildings, astronomical events can “spark curiosity, and a sense of shared wonder.” This attention, while fleeting, is essential. It’s a reminder that we live on a tilted, rotating planet orbiting something much larger—a perspective scientists increasingly see as essential to spatial memory and pro-environmental behavior.
It may not feel like it, but our lives are inextricably linked to the cosmos. For most of human history, the sun’s path was essential knowledge, used for timekeeping, navigation, and agriculture. Today, that awareness is almost entirely outsourced to devices. The average person can’t point to where the sun sets in July or in December, let alone explain why it changes.
Agüeros sees this as more than just a knowledge gap. “There’s nothing wrong with technology per se,” he says, “but it’s removed the sense of where these significant seasonal markers and dates come from.” The result is a growing disconnection, not just from the sky, but from how we orient ourselves in, and relate to, our environments.
Wayfinding, for example—the process of ascertaining one’s position and following a route—was developed almost entirely through our ability to pay close attention to environmental cues: the sun, stars, wind and terrain. In other words, an acute understanding of the natural world is what made complex human navigation possible. Without this practice, we pay less attention to our surroundings.
In cities, we no longer need to look to nature to orient ourselves. And this new habit is affecting our brains. Studies show that regular use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation, weakening the hippocampus. Longer term, relying on digital tools as opposed to environmental cues may also weaken cultural and hereditary transmission of environmental knowledge.
Agüeros contemplates this loss even in a field like astronomy, where nature lies at the center. “I think there’s this real loss of awareness that the natural world is actually still available to people, even in a light-polluted city.” The wonders of nature, he says, are not ancient history. “They are, in fact, still happening, and they’re observable, if you just take the time to notice them.”
Today, there’s growing interest in whether taking time to notice nature might do more than orient us physically. Psychologists studying awe have found that experiences evoking a sense of scale or perspective can increase empathy, reduce entitlement and strengthen social bonds. Some scholars call this “the cosmic perspective”: the mental shift that comes from seeing yourself as relatively small within the vast scale and history of the universe.
Manhattanhenge is a reminder that we live on a tilted, rotating planet orbiting something much larger—a perspective scientists link to stronger spatial awareness and environmental concern.
Events like solar eclipses or rare Manhattan sunsets can, albeit briefly, trigger that feeling. The same is true of the recent Artemis II mission, which briefly returned public attention to the Moon. “There’s a lot of power in it,” Agüeros says, having seen the last two total eclipses in the United States. “I think it does maybe provide a sense of our shared humanity, and at a time when there aren’t lot of things that do that.”
There is, of course, a limit to what one sunset can do for our shared humanity. But choosing to notice what’s happening in the sky—where the sun sets, what phase the moon is in—can restore a kind of literacy that many people have lost. “The night sky belongs to everyone,” Agüeros told me. It’s a comforting thought.
Indeed, the sky is a shared resource. But even so, there are specific places on Earth where its beauty undeniably presents itself in miraculous ways. Utah is one such place. In the desert you can find Nancy Holt’s well-known land-art installation, Sun Tunnels, where four concrete cylinders have been placed to align perfectly with the solstices. “It’s magnificent,” Agüeros admits. “But also, a little ironic, as you don’t have to go to Utah to see the solstice.”
Each spring, for a few days, the setting sun aligns perfectly with the hallway in Agüeros’s apartment building in New York, casting golden light through the corridor. “I call my kids—I say, come look!” Even in a built environment, we can let the natural world in. “There’s this magic moment that comes when you’re lighting up a place that is not usually lit—you just have to know where to look.”
Cate Twining-Ward is a journalist and photographer covering zoonotic disease, conservation and climate change. She holds an MPA in Environmental Science and Policy from Columbia University.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Columbia Climate School, Earth Institute or Columbia University.
