Some dials hold special significance such as the Kentucky War Memorial Sundial or shown here, Freedom High School Dial in memorial to those that died on Sept. 11, 2001. The tip of the gnomon shadow falls on four markers at the time of the plane crashes.
This weekend on October 6th a new sundial was dedicated in Atlanta, Georgia. Ayokunle Odeleye, nationally renowned artist, has created a modernistic bronze and stainless steel sundial called “Chi Wara Sundial Lantern.” The 8-foot tall sundial is accessible at ground level, sitting in a 20-foot circular plaza with hour marks at the circumference.
Interestingly, it functions as a sundial by day, but shines as a lantern by night. The public artwork honors twelve community leaders from Cascade Heights located in southwest Atlanta for their spiritual and cultural contributions to their community and Atlanta.
Odeleye’s sundial took inspiration from Mali folklore of West Africa and the headdress of Chi Wara, a mythical creature that is half-man and half-antelope. As noted by the city of Atlanta, the sundial represents “a headdress in special ceremonial harvest dance designed to pass on knowledge from the elders to young people in the viliage. Odeleye’s ‘Chi Wara Sundial Lantern’ interprets this mythological image and conceptually uses it to suggest the ceremonial passing of scholarship from Cascade elders to the youth of this community."
Want to know the history of Cranmer Park in Denver Colorado and why the current Erickson equatorial dial is there on the terrazzo plaza? Downtown Main Street provides a glimpse of its history and the dynamiting of a dial that stood in the park for 25 years before. Read the article in Downtown Main Street and visit the North American Sundial Registry Entry NASS Denver Sundial-24.
Old News is New
Posted: Sunday, 23 September 2012 18:25
Building on the success of the 2010 USA Science & Engineering Festival, the North American Sundial Society and Analemma Society joined nearly 1500 other activities at the Expo in Washington DC on April 28-29, 2012 presenting "Sundials, the World's Oldest Clocks". That's the old news. The new twist is that Ken Clark of NASS made it to youtube describing sundials. You can watch too:
Last Updated on Sunday, 23 September 2012 18:30
9-11 Memorial Sundial Dedicated at Croton Landing
Posted: Sunday, 09 September 2012 12:30
On September 11, 2012 the Town of Cortlandt and the Villages of Buchanan and Croton-on-Hudson in New York will dedicate a giant sundial as part of a 9-11 memorial using steel salvaged from the World Trade Center site. All are welcome to the dedication.
Visitors attending the dedication of the Buchanan*Cortlandt*Croton-on-Hudson (BCC) 9-11 Remembrance Memorial are asked to assemble at 2:30 pm at the Croton Landing parking lot and walk the 1/2 mile to the memorial site for the 3 o’clock ceremony. A van will be available for those who wish to ride. For further information, please call the Project Director, Janet Mainiero at 914-271-8222.
A steel beam from the north tower of the World Trade Center forms a 13 ½ foot tall sundial gnomon at the center of the BCC 9-11 Remembrance Memorial located along the shores of the Hudson River at Croton Landing. The memorial is dedicated in remembrance of the attacks on our nation and to the first and second responders and emergency rescuers who risked and gave their lives during that eventful day. James Rhodes, sundial designer and memorial architect said “It stands as a symbol that the community cares.”
The concept for the memorial began in 2009 when the New York Port Authority announced it would distribute pieces of steel from the World Trade Center for use in memorials. James Rhodes of Preservation Design became the architect and working with artist Lauren Davis and the community turned the twisted steel wreckage of 9-11 into an eternal timepiece. The design includes not only the sundial but a life-size bronze statue of a woman reaching, but not quite touching the steel I-beam with arms outstretched under the shadow of the twisted gnomon representing both the lost and those left to mourn.
Three local governments, the Cortlandt Town Board, the Croton Board of Trustees, and the Buchanan Board of Trustees, as well as private donations have contributed to the memorial. Janet Mainiero, Project Director, announced in June 2012 that the project would move forward in two phases after five contractors offered in-kind services. The bronze statute has been moved to a later phase.
The sundial gnomon, a 1000-pound, 14-foot long twisted I-Beam from the World Trade Center’s north tower will be held at an angle of 41 deg 21 minutes by an 16-ton boulder with inset channel to cradle the twisted steel. Because of the twist and bend in the I-beam, the gnomon base is rotated 9 degrees off true north and the launch angle in the gneiss boulder is one degree greater than the latitude. The offset alignment allows the upper end of the gnomon to point accurately to the north celestial pole, casting shadows of the local solar time.
The hours are marked with 10-inch diameter bronze plaques from 8am to 4pm along a great circle of granite stone approximately 30 feet in diameter. The plaques remember the crashes into each tower, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania crash of UA flight 93. Other plaques memorialize first responders, rescue dogs, and hope for the future, while Old Glory flies on the noon hour marker.
[Installation and plaque photos and site plan drawing provided through the kindness of James Rhodes]. See construction photos of the memorial dial and read more from the Cortlandt Daily Voice:
The North American Sundial Society held its 2012 conference in Asheville NC, August 16-19. Alice Io Oglesby and Hugh Munro, local hosts and sundial enthusiasts, took NASS members on a sundial tour through Asheville and the rolling hills of western North Carolina to see the vertical dials at Sunny Point Café and the analemmatic dial of the “kitchen garden” at the Biltmore Estate. In Burnsville, NASS members saw the Quilt Block Sundial, one of over 200 colourful quilt block paintings along the North Carolina Quilt Block Trail. NASS was welcomed by the Mayor of Burnsville and had the Quilt Block sundial explained by Bob Hampton, astronomer designer and Martin Weaver artist. The Quilt Block Sundial in Burnsville was a most impressive example of teamwork and community support. Travelling further, Brian Leonard showed the armillary sundial he fabricated and installed in Marshall, NC.
The NASS conference included exciting talks on a colourful “Parallel Time East West Sundial” presented by new NASS member Peggy Gunnerson and shadow alignments at Toshogu Shrine by Barry Duell of the Tokyo International University. Frank King talked about a most unusual circular analemmatic dial he designed for the Metropolitana of Naples (an Italian job). Dr. King was also this year’s recipient of the Sawyer Dialing Prize. Roger Bailey discussed dials of Mallorca and the “Box of Sapphires”, a compendium designed by Ibn al-Shatir in the 14th century. Fred Sawyer gave a most interesting talk on “Projected Refraction Sundials with Ambigram”, and at the NASS dinner on Saturday, he distributed a special gift to NASS participants: a location specific projected refraction sundial with the ambigram showing “CARPE” on the dial and “DIEM” in the projected shadow. Other speakers with interesting presentations included Alice Io Oglesby, Bill Gottesman, Dudley Warner and Ken Clark. Next year’s conference is being planned for Boston.
Photos shown: (Top) NASS conference participants underneath Bob Hampton's Quilt Block Dial; (Bottom Left) NASS members examine Alice Oglesby and Hugh Munro's vertical dial at Sunny Point Cafe; and (Bottom Right) Bob Hampton's Equatorial Dial made from a bent yardstick.
With the successful landing of the NASA rover Curiosity, another sundial is on planet Mars. Turning the color calibration target into a sundial was the idea of Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and Professor Woodruff Sullivan at the University of Washington, originally hailed by “Two Worlds – One Sun” encouraging people around the world to make their own sundials and collectively participate using webcams to tell solar time around the earth.See: http://sundials.org/index.php/features/168-curiosity-sundial-launchedand read the details of the sundial with the following PDF download: MarsDialReport.pdf
Curiosity’s calibration target was created by Tyler Nordgren at the University of Redlands. However Nordgren and a group of six scientists, astronomers, educators, and artists (including Nye and Sullivan) went further. Said Nordgren, "But we thought, why not use this very dry boring technical piece of equipment, and turn it into something beautiful and evocative?"
The calibration target turned sundial is actually a leftover from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Spirit. Along the edges of the sundial MARS is written out in 16 different languages. The sundial’s center represents the sun with a concentric grey ring for the earth’s nearly circular orbit and a displaced white ring for Mars eccentric orbit. The positions of Earth and Mars, shown respectively by a blue and red dot are placed for the date of impact at 10:32 pm Aug 5th PDT. Every MARS sundial has a date and motto. “It's sundial tradition,” says Nordgren. Curiosity says "MARS 2012" and "TO MARS TO EXPLORE."
A new sundial project called “Meantime in Greenwich” opened on “Dingle Day” August 6th in Sir Sandford Fleming Park (affectionately known as “Dingle Park”) located in the Halifax Regional Municipality of Nova Scotia. Media artist David Clark created a series of 24 horizontal sundials that surround the Memorial (Dingle) Tower, a site that once had been Fleming's summer home. Visitors to the public exhibit can download a free app onto their phone or iPad and hear an audio story when they approach each sundial. For iPhone users, aiming its camera at the sundial triggers a 3D object to appear on the screen. As Clark describes it, “Each sundial becomes a pedestal for virtual reality. Everybody becomes their own cinema.”
The public art project honors Sir Sandford Fleming, Chief Engineer of the Northern Railway Grand Trunk Railway who devised standard time. His original idea was Cosmic Time, what we now call Universal Time that is independent of longitude. In 1879 he proposed that time be linked to the anti-meridian of Greenwich (180o longitude) and lobbied for the use of time zones at the1884 International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. “What he did was wean us away from solar time - he developed the 24 time zones,” said Clark, “I thought an ironic monument to him would be to place 24 sundials across the park.” If one looks closely at these sundials, the hours are labeled in both “Standard Time” and “Daylight Saving Time” with a small graph of the Equation of Time to translate local solar time into Atlantic Zone Time.
Read more about the phone apps, the 24 sundials and about Sir Sandford Fleming, inventor of Standard Time:
At 3pm on August 15th Roger Bailey of the North American Sundial Society will hold a public lecture on the historic Ibn al-Shatir sundial at the Great Falls Library in VA. The Analemma Society proposes to recreate the dial’s design, adapted for the latitude of Observatory Park, The Turner Farm, in Great Falls, VA.
Hopefully this will be the second major dial at Observatory Park maintained by the Analemma Society in conjunction with the Fairfax County Park Authority. The first dial was a commemorative dial designed and built by Tony Moss for the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, VA.
“High on the minaret of the Great Mosque in Damascus is a remarkable sundial created by Ibn al-Shatir in 1371. Through the 10th to 14th centuries the science of astronomy, timekeeping and sundials had advanced in major Moslem centres like Cairo and Damascus. Based on the developing science of timekeeping, Ibn al-Shatir designed a unique instrument that was a breakthrough…The sundial features equal hours rather than the previous system of dividing the day into 12 hours regardless of the seasonal changes.”
Three different time systems are drawn on the dial, reading time from sunrise, sunset and noon. “The dial has reference lines for all five Moslem prayer times, even those at daybreak and nightfall when the sun was well below the horizon. This sundial was the first to use a polar gnomon, parallel to the earth’s axis and pointed north… The dial represents technological changes anticipating the design of sundials created later in the Islamic Middle East and Christian Europe….”
Update: On Saturday July 22nd, less than two weeks after the Henry Moore sundial was stolen, it was recovered by detectives after receiving tips from the British Crimewatch television series. Three young men, all from Essex, have been arrested on suspicion of two counts of theft and are currently in police custody. Read about it at: http://www.artlyst.com/articles/stolen-henry-moore-bronze-sundial-recovered-three-arrested-in-essex
Story:On the 10th of July, 2012 was another significant sundial loss. A 22-inch bronze equatorial dial designed by the famous British sculpture Henry Moore was stolen from the grounds at the Hertfordshire museum in Much Hadham, UK. Police are appealing for any information.
Is it now the part of someone’s private collection? In 2005 thieves stole a Moore bronze statue “Reclining Figure” from the museum. The statue weighed 2 tons, requiring the thieves to use a crane for its removal. Then in 2010 other thieves stole a Moore sketch called “Three Reclining Figures On Pedestals” along with other artist paintings from the Trinity House Paintings on Broadway High Street, Worcestershire.
Because of Henry Moore’s fame as a sculpture and artist, the sundial is valued at £500,000. The small dial built in 1965 was a model for a much larger dial that now resides in Germany. Read about that dial in the forthcoming North American Sundial Society article in The Compendium coming out in this September’s quarterly issue.
Last Updated on Sunday, 22 July 2012 16:54
Ivory Diptych Sundial Unearthed at Jamestown
Posted: Wednesday, 04 July 2012 14:37
At historic Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English colony in the New World, a rare 17th century ivory sundial was found during recent excavations. You can read about it in Popular Archaeology June-2012
A small ivory diptych sundial was discovered during the Jamestown Rediscovery Archaeological Project dig of soil where a cellar stood as part of the early James Fort. The pocket dial was crafted by Hans Miler, most probably of Nuremberg, Germany. You can see a similar Nuremberg Diptych Sundial from Metropolitan Museum of Art made by Hans Troschel the Elder. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/03.21.38
Michael Lavin, Senior Conservator of the Jamestown Rediscovery Archaeological Project used a Serle Dialing Ruler made by the North American Sundial Society (NASS) to measure the hour lines of the diptych dial, concluding the dial’s latitude was made for approximately 53 degrees. Visit http://www.historicjamestowne.org/the_dig/and view the unearthing of the dial in the video below:
Last Updated on Wednesday, 04 July 2012 14:51
Fischer Dial Dedicated in New Milford, CT
Posted: Tuesday, 19 June 2012 21:26
On Saturday, June 9th 2012, the volunteers of the John J. McCarthy Observatory in New Milford, CT, dedicated a 9-foot stainless steel sundial as the centerpiece of “Galileo’s Garden” adjacent to the John J. McCarthy Observatory. The sundial was built and dedicated in memory of Kathleen Fischer, a sixth-grade science teacher who inspired many students to pursue science.
The sundial is an open armillary, with an adjustable hour band for standard and daylight time. At the tip of the gnomon is a bronze and brass true-size rendering of Galileo’s first telescope, honoring the 400 years since Galileo explored the heavens. The North American Sundial Society was privileged to donate to this effort.
The instrument rests on a one-ton granite disk donated by Goodrich of Danbury, CT. The disk was used in the tooling process for making telescope mirrors and serves as a unique base for the sundail.
The sundial was designed with graceful geometric curves – including catenary curves, parabolas, and circle arcs. And the dial is situated in a flower garden with 60 varieties of sunflowers, part of a student gardening project. Seen with the sundial is a 6-foot model of the sun, located in the center of a six-mile scale solar system that traverses the town of New Milford.
Features
This weekend on October 6th a new sundial was dedicated in Atlanta, Georgia. Ayokunle Odeleye, nationally renowned artist, has created a modernistic bronze and stainless steel sundial called “Chi Wara Sundial Lantern.” The 8-foot tall sundial is accessible at ground level, sitting in a 20-foot circular plaza with hour marks at the circumference.
Want to know the history of Cranmer Park in Denver Colorado and why the current Erickson equatorial dial is there on the terrazzo plaza? Downtown Main Street provides a glimpse of its history and the dynamiting of a dial that stood in the park for 25 years before. Read the article in 
On September 11, 2012 the Town of Cortlandt and the Villages of Buchanan and Croton-on-Hudson in New York will dedicate a giant sundial as part of a 9-11 memorial using steel salvaged from the World Trade Center site. All are welcome to the dedication.
The concept for the memorial began in 2009 when the New York Port Authority announced it would distribute pieces of steel from the World Trade Center for use in memorials. James Rhodes of Preservation Design became the architect and working with artist Lauren Davis and the community turned the twisted steel wreckage of 9-11 into an eternal timepiece. The design includes not only the sundial but a life-size bronze statue of a woman reaching, but not quite touching the steel I-beam with arms outstretched under the shadow of the twisted gnomon representing both the lost and those left to mourn.
The sundial gnomon, a 1000-pound, 14-foot long twisted I-Beam from the World Trade Center’s north tower will be held at an angle of 41 deg 21 minutes by an 16-ton boulder with inset channel to cradle the twisted steel. Because of the twist and bend in the I-beam, the gnomon base is rotated 9 degrees off true north and the launch angle in the gneiss boulder is one degree greater than the latitude. The offset alignment allows the upper end of the gnomon to point accurately to the north celestial pole, casting shadows of the local solar time.
The North American Sundial Society held its 2012 conference in Asheville NC, August 16-19. Alice Io Oglesby and Hugh Munro, local hosts and sundial enthusiasts, took NASS members on a sundial tour through Asheville and the rolling hills of western North Carolina to see the vertical dials at Sunny Point Café and the analemmatic dial of the “kitchen garden” at the Biltmore Estate. In Burnsville, NASS members saw the Quilt Block Sundial, one of over 200 colourful quilt block paintings along the North Carolina Quilt Block Trail. NASS was welcomed by the Mayor of Burnsville and had the Quilt Block sundial explained by Bob Hampton, astronomer designer and Martin Weaver artist. The Quilt Block Sundial in Burnsville was a most impressive example of teamwork and community support. Travelling further, Brian Leonard showed the armillary sundial he fabricated and installed in Marshall, NC.
With the successful landing of the NASA rover Curiosity, another sundial is on planet Mars. Turning the color calibration target into a sundial was the idea of Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and Professor Woodruff Sullivan at the University of Washington, originally hailed by “Two Worlds – One Sun” encouraging people around the world to make their own sundials and collectively participate using webcams to tell solar time around the earth. See: 
A new sundial project called “Meantime in Greenwich” opened on “Dingle Day” August 6th in Sir Sandford Fleming Park (affectionately known as “Dingle Park”) located in the Halifax Regional Municipality of Nova Scotia. Media artist David Clark created a series of 24 horizontal sundials that surround the Memorial (Dingle) Tower, a site that once had been Fleming's summer home. Visitors to the public exhibit can download a free app onto their phone or iPad and hear an audio story when they approach each sundial. For iPhone users, aiming its camera at the sundial triggers a 3D object to appear on the screen. As Clark describes it, “Each sundial becomes a pedestal for virtual reality. Everybody becomes their own cinema.”
The public art project honors Sir Sandford Fleming, Chief Engineer of the Northern Railway Grand Trunk Railway who devised standard time. His original idea was Cosmic Time, what we now call Universal Time that is independent of longitude. In 1879 he proposed that time be linked to the anti-meridian of Greenwich (180o longitude) and lobbied for the use of time zones at the1884 International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. “What he did was wean us away from solar time - he developed the 24 time zones,” said Clark, “I thought an ironic monument to him would be to place 24 sundials across the park.” If one looks closely at these sundials, the hours are labeled in both “Standard Time” and “Daylight Saving Time” with a small graph of the Equation of Time to translate local solar time into Atlantic Zone Time.
At 3pm on August 15th Roger Bailey of the North American Sundial Society will hold a public lecture on the historic Ibn al-Shatir sundial at the Great Falls Library in VA. The Analemma Society proposes to recreate the dial’s design, adapted for the latitude of Observatory Park, The Turner Farm, in Great Falls, VA.
At historic Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English colony in the New World, a rare 17th century ivory sundial was found during recent excavations. You can read about it in 
On Saturday, June 9th 2012, the volunteers of the John J. McCarthy Observatory in New Milford, CT, dedicated a 9-foot stainless steel sundial as the centerpiece of “Galileo’s Garden” adjacent to the John J. McCarthy Observatory. The sundial was built and dedicated in memory of Kathleen Fischer, a sixth-grade science teacher who inspired many students to pursue science.