Kicker: Reverse Manhattanhenge

AUDIO: Air 11 with you.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s a news crew in a chopper flying over the Hudson in New York City. The pilot noticed something different about sunrise that day. The sound here from PIX-11 News.

AUDIO: Actually, that’s kind of nice actually.

Twice a year, the sun rises or sets in line with the city’s grid, so that the sunshine runs straight from one side of the city to the other.

That’s because the Big Apple’s grid is 30 degrees from true North. Similar in effect to Stonehenge.

Two decades ago, Neil DeGrasse Tyson had a name for it, and it’s stuck. Here he is in a video from 2013:

TYSON: These alignments are not made of stone. They're made of buildings. And Manhattan is about buildings, and so I just thought of calling it Manhattanhenge.

It turns out even world-weary New Yorkers can still be awestruck.

AUDIO: I don't know, Tom, is that spectacular?

It’s The World and Everything in It.

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