It was already dark out when dozens of people streamed into the Octagon Earthworks’ visitor center in Newark on Saturday evening.
They gathered in the ballroom upstairs, only to be told they might still miss the night's main event.
"The reality is even if there's stars overhead, if a bank of clouds rises up in the northeast, you won't see the moon rise," explained Jeff Gill, a volunteer interpreter with Ohio History Connection.
The crowd had come to see a rare moon alignment with the earthworks. Indigenous people built the massive earthen structures around 2,000 years ago to line up with a roughly 18-year lunar cycle. At certain times, the northernmost moon rise lines up with a set of parallel walls in the structure.
Saturday's alignment wasn't the northernmost moon rise of the cycle, but it was close enough to provide a sense of what ancient people would have seen.
“And to actually stand where people stood 2,000 years ago, and watch the moon — the same moon that they saw rise in the same place all those years ago. I mean, it's a way of connecting not only with these ancient indigenous people, but also with literally the cosmos," said Brad Lepper, the senior archeologist for Ohio History Connection's World Heritage Program.
The Octagon and seven other earthworks became Ohio’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site about two years ago. The sites' inscription on UNESCO's list acknowledges the genius it took for ancient people to build the complicated structures.
"There's no signal, there's no advance notice. Here's just darkness and anticipation and expectation. And then, there's a spark, a glow of orange in the trees."- Jeff Gill, volunteer interpreter at Ohio History Connection
Discovering a lunar alignment
The Octagon was not always considered an act of genius, however. The idea that any ancient monument would align with the moon was once considered radical, Lepper said.
Archeologists Ray Hively and Robert Horn concluded the Octagon lined up with the moon in the early 1980s. They had come to the Octagon trying to disprove that ancient people aligned structures to solar events like eclipses.
Lepper said Hively and Horn's theory was that if you took any complicated monument and drew enough lines through it, you would accidentally find a solar alignment. That didn't happen at the Octagon.
"With all the possible alignments you could draw through the site, they found no alignments to the sun," Lepper said. “Then they said, well, maybe it's not lined up to the sun because it lined up with something else.”
That’s how they found out the earthworks align with where the moon appears and disappears on the horizon. Those places widen and contract over an 18.6-year period. Hively and Horn also found that a similar earthwork in Chillicothe had the same alignments.
The northernmost moon rise
The northernmost moonrise in the cycle can be seen through a passageway of parallel earthen walls that links a large circle to the eight-sided shape that gives the earthworks its name.
The moon last rose on — or nearly on — that axis in the mid-2000s. Lepper and Gill were there.
Gill said it dawned on them that they may have been the first people to intentionally participate in what the earthworks were designed to do in 1,500 years.
"And honestly, that's the kind of thing you get into archeology for," Gill said.
Back then, Lepper and Gill couldn't bring along a crowd, because the Octagon Earthworks was a private golf club. After a long legal dispute, Ohio History Connection bought out Moundbuilders Country Club's lease and opened the earthworks to the public at the beginning of this year.
Now, Lepper and Gill can finally share that experience with the public.
Expectation
Before heading out, Gill explained what people could expect.
"Most of us, for good reasons or bad, have had occasion to watch the sun come up," Gill said. "The sunrise is a pretty straightforward thing. It announces itself over an hour and a half in advance. It doesn't sneak up on you."
The moon, Gill said, is different.
"There's no signal, there's no advance notice. Here's just darkness and anticipation and expectation. And then, there's a spark, a glow of orange in the trees," he said.
A little before 10 p.m. the group headed out, carrying red-light flashlights. A line of little crimson circles bobbed in the thick darkness as folks followed a path lit by tealights. They stopped at the mouth of the parallel walls and turned their eyes to the horizon. It was a clear night, full of stars.
The moon was scheduled to rise at 10:05 p.m., but with a line of tall trees blocking the horizon, no one expected to see it for at least 15 or 20 minutes.
At first, a chorus of whispers stirred the air. As the minutes dragged on, people fell nearly silent, until all that was left was crickets, the rustle of jackets, and the shuffle of feet on grass.
And then, it happened – a spark.
For an entire hour, a hundred people watch the moon glow orange as it climbed through a tree and broke into the sky.
Reaction
“It was a little more somber than I was anticipating, you know, because everyone's standing there quietly, which I think is amazing in and of itself in 2025, you know," said Dublin resident Joe Suarez
Julie Melendez, of Bowling Green, who was vising a friend in the area, called the experience, "peaceful."
"You can think. You know, you could just take it in and smell the smells and hear the sounds," she said.
Andrew Selfe was serving as the AmeriCorps service member for the sight, and helped lead the group to and from the viewpoint.
“It was very, very awesome, very cool," Selfe said. "I've never wanted to cut a tree down more in my entire life, I think, but that's okay."
Suarez, Melendez and Selfe were all first-time moon-watchers.
Timothy Black, of Newark, on the other hand, has watched more than 30 moonrises or moonsets over the years. He’s a former news photographer and enjoys documenting these lunar events.
When asked if there was something challenging or exciting about photographing the moonrise, Black's answer was simple. "Waiting. It’s all about the waiting."
