Star Chasers of Senegal

A NASA spacecraft named Lucy blasts off from Cape Canaveral on a mission to the Trojans, a group of asteroids over 400 million miles from Earth thought to hold important clues about the origins of our solar system. Just hours before, in Senegal, West Africa, a team of scientists sets out to capture extraordinarily precise observations vital to the success of the Lucy mission.

The instrument only requires the observation of the sun’s position to begin making calculations.

Along the river Gambia in Senegal, there are more than a thousand stone circles. The people who placed these stones would have observed how the locations of sunrise and sunset varied over the year.