Manhattanhenge is back! | Space photo of the day for June 1, 2026
Space.com named Manhattanhenge its space photo of the day for June 1, 2026 — the annual reminder that Manhattan's street grid lines up with the sunset twice a year. Making that prediction work is the job of Jackie Faherty.
The person who calculates Manhattanhenge every year is Jackie Faherty. Her job is to run the geometry — account for the exact street orientation, the building heights along each candidate corridor, and the precise time when the sun's disc meets the horizon at each viewing street — then post the official dates before New Yorkers start asking on Twitter. She describes herself as the "official calculator of Manhattanhenge." Attempts to reach Faherty and Tyson for this story were unsuccessful. Public records show no formal description of how the calculation responsibility transferred or whether it transferred at all — whether Faherty inherited Tyson's framework or built her own geometry from scratch is a gap the available record does not close.
The reason it needs calculating at all is the grid itself: Manhattan's streets run 29 degrees clockwise from true east-west. That tilt means the sun only lines up twice a year, and only for a few minutes when it does. American Museum of Natural History
The naming belongs to Neil deGrasse Tyson, who coined the term Manhattanhenge in 1997, by analogy with Stonehenge. His version is a city-scaled accident of urban planning — Manhattan's developers laid out the grid in the early 19th century without any intention to create an astronomical alignment. Wikipedia
Faherty's role was not to name it. Her role is to make the prediction work, year after year, without anyone realizing how much depends on her getting the geometry right.
The alignment window is genuinely short. Tonight's full sun lasts roughly three minutes around 8:13pm ET before the disc drops below the rooftop line. American Museum of Natural History
Tonight's full-sun alignment appears along 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, and 57th Streets, the same cross-streets that worked last year and the year before. The half-sun version — half the disc above the horizon, half below — comes tomorrow evening, May 28th at 8:14pm ET. American Museum of Natural History
The summer window closes after July 11th and 12th, the second pairing of full and half sun alignments. Then it doesn't return until next spring. Faherty's dates are already posted for that too.
What is visible is the work itself: her name on the official dates, her geometry keeping the photo op accurate, the crowds of people lining up to watch the sun align with streets that were never designed for it — while she stays, by choice, the person nobody asks about. The gap is structural: Tyson coined the term and remains its public face. Faherty runs the calculation and posts the dates. Neither AMNH nor Tyson has described how the responsibility transferred, or whether it transferred at all. Science communication has a pattern here — the people who name things stay visible, the people who make the names accurate tend not to. That Faherty holds a senior educator role at AMNH rather than a media-facing one may explain something about who gets credited and who does the work. The invisibility is the story.