Been thinking about this for a while actually. The astronomical alignment angle gets thrown around a lot but most people stop at "solstice markers" and leave it there, which I think undersells what's happening at Nazca considerably.
Maria Reiche spent decades mapping the solar and lunar alignments in those lines and her data still holds up. Some of the longer straight lines do track heliacal risings of specific stars - Pleiades alignment is the one that keeps coming up in relation to rainfall prediction.
The "landing calendar" framing is interesting but I'd push back slightly on the extraterrestrial interpretation before we've properly exhausted the indigenous astronomical knowledge angle. These were sophisticated people managing agriculture in one of the driest places on earth. A precision calendar system makes complete functional sense without needing outside intervention.
That said the sheer scale of some of the geoglyphs does raise questions about why ground-level visibility matters at all if its purely ceremonial. Would genuinely like to hear what others here think about teh visibility problem - its the bit that keeps nagging at me.
