A new two-part crop picture at Milk Hill on June 21-22, 2009 shows the symbolism of a “sextant” and an “orrery”, plus a clever astronomical time code for the emission of some small astronomical body by our Sun

A new two-part crop picture at Milk Hill on June 21-22, 2009 has stunned the world, or at least that small part of it who are intelligent and open-minded enough to follow English crop pictures! What could it possibly mean?

Several readers have already made the following helpful suggestions (see milkhill3):

"It looks like a sextant used by the Navy for navigation at sea by the stars. It also seems to be pointing towards some specific planetary alignment" (Paul Anderson).

"The first thing I saw in that new Milk Hill crop formation was our planetary system" (Sascha Klein).

"It resembles a pair of compasses as an instrument used for measuring distance" (Mark Vidler).

"Its teardrop shape has been noted in other commentaries as signifying a solar storm. This new image speaks of what appears to be a technological relationship to such a storm" (Steve).

Here we will expand upon those helpful suggestions, in order to determine in precise detail, what this new and amazing crop picture might really mean.

Part I of Milk Hill on June 21, 2009 showed the symbolism of a “sextant” 

As shown in the explanatory diagram below, Part I of Milk Hill on June 21 clearly looked like a “sextant”, which has long been used to measure the “altitude” or height above the horizon of various astronomical objects in Earth’s sky (see Sextant):  

It also showed a second underlying symbolism for “Earth” and “Moon”, where planet Earth was drawn with a "teardrop” shape, while our Moon was drawn with a standard “dumbbell” shape first noted in the early 1990’s (see time2007f). That “teardrop” shape is the usual scientific symbol for a CME or coronal mass ejection from our Sun (see milkhill).  

The two long measuring arms of that “sextant” are aligned in the field close to due north or due east, which match where our Moon will be located (under the horizon) at times of 1200 or 1700 UT on an upcoming date of July 7, 2009.  

At first it might seem bizarre that extra-terrestrials could be showing us a “sextant” in English fields, but on several occasions from 2003 to 2008 they showed us an “astrolabe”, which is another astronomical measuring device from Earth’s past (see time2007x).  

Part II of Milk Hill on June 22, 2009 showed the symbolism of an “orrery”

Part II of Milk Hill on June 22 also seems to show astronomical symbolism, and closely resembles an “orrery”, which is a traditional mechanical device used to illustrate planetary motions (see Orrery):

This particular orrery seems to be based on the Earth-centred model favoured by Claudius Ptolemy in ancient Alexandria (150 AD), and taught throughout the Middle Ages, rather than the Sun-centred model introduced by Copernicus in 1540 AD.  

Ptolemy’s Earth-centred model for our solar system  

We are all familiar today with Copernicus’s heliocentric model for our solar system, which places the Sun at its centre, and nine planets all around. Yet most people today do not know about Ptolemy’s geocentric model for our solar system, and that is why we have shown it below:  

Planet Earth lies at its centre, while five bright planets, the Sun and Moon rotate around the outside. The relative order of those seven bright astronomical objects in Ptolemy’s model, when going outward from the centre, are 1 = Moon, 2 = Mercury, 3 = Venus, 4 = Sun, 5 = Mars, 6 = Jupiter and 7 = Saturn (see time2007u).  

The Milk Hill crop picture shows curved orbital paths along the right for only five of those astronomical objects: namely 1 = Moon, 2 = Mercury, 3 = Venus, 4 = Sun and 6 = Jupiter. We will discuss below why 5 = Mars and 7 = Saturn may have been omitted.  

Along the top, that Milk Hill crop picture then shows six of seven planetary symbols 1-2-3-4-5-6 (when including the outermost curved line), so as to match six rectangular boxes that were drawn immediately below. Clearly those “boxes” have some connection to Ptolemy’s astronomical objects 1-2-3-4-5-6, but what could their relation be?  

Altitudes above or below the local horizon for our Moon, four planets and the Sun 

The answer to this apparently difficult problem is actually quite simple: what is the true purpose of a “sextant”, as shown at Milk Hill one day earlier? 

Well, a sextant tells how high in the sky any bright astronomical object might be at a given time of observation, in units of 0^o to 90^o relative to the local horizon. In astronomical language, those heights in the sky are called “altitudes”. 

Could each of those six rectangular boxes be telling us relative altitudes, for Ptolemy’s six astronomical objects 1-2-3-4-5-6 at some calendar date in the near future? With that idea in mind, we used an astronomical almanac (see almanac) to calculate altitudes for the Sun, Moon and five bright planets over a wide range of dates during the summer of 2009. Then we compared those calculated values with the relative heights of six boxes shown in Part II of Milk Hill. 

The hourly time of observation clearly has to be close to 1200 UT, since one arm of that “sextant” is aligned south to north, parallel to the crop tramlines, while our Sun lies due south at noon in southern England. As shown below, our best theoretical matches to the crop picture were for upcoming dates of July 6 or 7, 2009:

Table 1. Altitudes for latitude 51^o North, longitude 0^o West at 1200 UT