Aspects of Observational Astronomy in India: The Vidyasankara temple at Sringeri

Abstract

The navaranga in the medieval stone temple of Vidyasankara at Sringeri, built around A.D. 1350, has twelve zodiacal pillars arranged in a square with the zodiacal signs carved on them. It has been claimed that the morning sunrise lights up the pillar that corresponds to the zodiacal constellation in which Sun is located at that time, so the temple can be used as an instrument to predict calendar days. We carried out observations to investigate this aspect by monitoring both sunrises and sunsets, and found that the correspondence between the illumination of specific pillars and the zodiacal sign of the Sun could only be maintained if the epoch for such an arrangement was around 2000 B.C. The implications of this finding are discussed in this paper.