Luxor will on Friday celebrate the sun’s alignment on the Temple of Amun, located inside the Karnak Temple.
The phenomenon is being celebrated for the second consecutive year in a bid to attract tourists to counter the decline in tourism since the January 25 revolution.
Luxor Governor Ezzat Saad called for intensifying efforts to make use of similar phenomena to boost tourism.
Nabta Playa is a large, complex archaeological site, in the desert 100 km northwest of Abu Simbel, where some of the earliest known evidence of astronomical observatories have been identified.
Some of the world’s earliest archaeo-astronomical devices, including the Stone Circle, were discovered at the Nabta Playa, some 11,000 years ago. Research suggests that the discoveries may have been used to determine the four cardinal directions and predict rainfall.
These findings also resolve the ambiguity on how the sun aligns every year on King Ramses II’s face at the Abu Simbel Temple, in another astronomical phenomenon that continues to amaze tourists from across the world.
Edited translation from DPA
