Lasers and Light from Wessex Archaeology on Vimeo.
This is an animation that I put together at Wessex Archaeology for the Society of Antiquaries‘ Making History exhibition at Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum.
I posted some more information about the animation over at the Wessex Archaeology Computing Blog, so I won’t repeat myself here!
Summer Solstice sunrise at the potential site for The Circle in the West.
We didn’t go to the summer solstice celebrations at Stonehenge this year. Instead, at 4am, we were standing at the potential site for The Circle in the West, a new monument planned to be a full size homage to Stonehenge, built from stone.
At about 4.20am, Colin Shearing located the centre of the circle, and we used RTK GPS (a very accurate satellite positioning system) to locate some of the basic features that are present at Stonehenge, laying out some of the key alignments and the position of the heelstone.
If this project comes to fruition, then it will be an impressive place indeed.
Happy Solstice!
Update: Tehm has written a very eloquent description of the morning – far better than I could have done!
Update 2: Pete Glastonbury has written a great piece about the project, complete with a panorama of the proposed site.
Stu Eve, and 
Elena 8:23 am on 11 November, 2008 Permalink
Wow, a really intresting animation! I have too look more closely at it when I get to my own computer at home…
Stu Eve 10:14 am on 27 May, 2009 Permalink
Tom, this looks really great – I love the LiDAR. How did you put the animation together? What software did you use?
Tom Goskar 1:07 pm on 27 May, 2009 Permalink
Hi Stu,
I used GlobalMapper, ArcGIS, and Vue 6 Infinite to produce it. I had to do some cunning things to make Vue accept the full (<1m) resolution DEM – involving a fractal-based terrain. I wanted to avoid interpolation/smoothing as much as possible. I also had to introduce primitives into the scene to mark out the key features in the landscape to aid the animation, but tell the camera not to render them. This is because the OpenGL system in Vue (and my video card) can’t display the whole scene in the viewport – only a simplified version (way too many polys). There was a bit of trial and error, but overall I’m pleased with the results. Had I more time, I’d make a far more impressive version using the filtered LiDAR dataset, and generating trees in the right places…
Cheers,
Tom