Surya is the chief solar deity of Hinduism, the visible god, unlike deities known only through image and story, who rides across the sky in a chariot drawn by seven horses, the colours of light, driven by his charioteer Aruna, the dawn. He is one of the Navagraha, the nine planetary powers, and is known by many names, among them Aditya, Ravi, Bhanu and Mitra. His worship is a daily practice that continues in ordinary Hindu life: the Gayatri mantra, one of the most sacred of all Vedic verses, is a meditation on the light of the sun-god recited at dawn, and the sequence of postures called Surya Namaskar, the sun-salutation, greets him at sunrise.
Surya's other great surviving temple, at Modhera in Gujarat, was built in the eleventh century under the Chaulukya king Bhima I and combines a shrine hall with a vast rectangular stepped tank, the Surya Kund, lined with over a hundred small subsidiary shrines descending to the water; the main sanctuary is oriented so that, at the equinoxes, the rising sun's light was designed to fall directly on the central image of the god, an alignment that has drawn comparison with similar solar orientations built into temples and monuments in other sun-worshipping cultures worldwide, from Egypt to the Americas, as independent solutions to the same architectural ambition of making sunlight itself part of the ritual.