History Channel

Ball State's Stonehenge simulation featured prominently in newest episode of "The Universe." Ball State's John Fillwalk interviewed on camera in the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts laboratory.

The revelations by a team led by Bernard Frischer, a professor in the Department of Informatics at Indiana University, and John Fillwalk, Director of the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts at Ball State University, fly in the face of a nearly 50-year-old theory by the German archaeologist and scholar Edmund Buchner, who first popularized the September 23 date. Using data from NASA’s Horizons System, an online computation tool that gives the precise location of celestial bodies from any time in history—including the age of Augustus—Frischer and Fillwalk’s group constructed a 3-D model of the Campus of Mars, the 490-acre section of Ancient Rome that housed many important public buildings including the Pantheon. While their simulations showed that the obelisk’s shadow does cross paths with the façade of the Ara Pacis on several other dates of the year, it only clips the edge of the altar on September 23. Note: The Huffington Post also posted this story.