At 11:11 a.m. every November 11, sunlight threads through oval holes cut in five white marble pillars in Anthem, Arizona, and lands as a single circle on a glass mosaic of the Great Seal of the United States. The Anthem Veterans Memorial was built so that this happens on Veterans Day, and only around that date.
The local community council, which runs the memorial in Anthem’s Community Park, says veterans and families gather each year to watch the light arrive. The memorial itself was dedicated on November 11, 2011, at 11 a.m., a date that reads 11-11-11.
Five pillars, one beam
Each pillar stands for one branch of the US armed forces, ranked by Pentagon precedence: the Army first, then the Marines, the Navy, the Air Force and finally the Coast Guard. They rise in steps, from about 6 feet to 17 feet, according to a memorial-dial registry kept by sundial enthusiasts. Every pillar has an elliptical opening angled down toward the seal, so the five openings line up for a few minutes a year.
The idea started with a sketch on the back of a napkin by local artist Renee Palmer-Jones. “My intent was to make Veterans Day significant and to distinguish it from any other day of the year by using the sun’s azimuth in Anthem at that exact time,” she said in the registry’s account of the project.
Project chief engineer Jim Martin worked out the geometry. He has described using trigonometry to project the pillars’ shadows onto the ground and sizing the elliptical openings so the beam forms “a perfect three-foot diameter circle to match the outline of the Great Seal”.
How exact is 11:11?
The designers aimed for 11:11:11 a.m. Mountain Standard Time. The calendar does not quite cooperate. Because leap years shift the solar position slightly from one November 11 to the next, the alignment over the coming century will land anywhere between 11:10:58 and 11:11:22. That is a window of 24 seconds, close enough that most people standing in the circle would never notice. The same quirk means the effect can also be seen a day before or after Veterans Day.
There is a lesser-known second show. Around February 1, our star reaches the same declination, about minus 17.28 degrees, so sundial enthusiasts point out that a second alignment happens then too.
Red, white and blue by design
The colors are part of the plan. Red brick pavers ring the pillars, many carrying the names of veterans and serving members, forming what the council calls the Circle of Honor. The marble pillars are white, and the Arizona sky supplies the blue. Counts of the engraved stones vary: one account gives about 2,200 named red stones, while the dial registry lists nearly 3,000 pavers in total, 750 of them inscribed at the time it wrote.
The project began in 2009 with retired Rear Adm. Ron Tucker and cost about $190,000. In 2012 it was named an Arizona historic landmark by the Arizona Historical Society and won state public works and engineering awards.
Why 11 o’clock
The time is not random. Veterans Day grew out of Armistice Day, which marks the moment the guns stopped in World War I. Badiyaa has explained how the 1918 Armistice was signed near 5 a.m. but took effect at 11 a.m., and how Remembrance Day’s two-minute silence began on a Cape Town street. Anthem’s pillars turn that same hour into light.
The memorial is closed to private bookings on Veterans Day and Memorial Day. The next sunlit alignment falls on November 11, 2027, at about 11:11 a.m. Mountain Standard Time, with the February echo around February 1 before that.
Further reading
Illustrative image. Image: neepster from Phoenix, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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