What's New Under The Sun
Getty Research Institute on the Solstice
Saturday, 22 June 2024 19:38Off Interstate 405 in the hills of Los Angeles is the Getty Research Institute, part of the campus of The Getty Center. The Center houses the free Getty Museum, the Getty Library, Getty Research Institute, Getty Foundation, and Getty Conservation Institute. The Getty Research Institute opened its doors to the public in December of 1997, where besides the thousands of books, art collections,...
Preparing for the Solar Eclipse of April 8th 2024
Sunday, 24 March 2024 18:30There are lots of maps showing where to go for the April 8th 2024 total solar eclipse and others showing the statistical chance of clouds such as https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/02/22/april-eclipse-clouds/ From Little Rock Arkansas to the Mazatlan coast there is a high probability of clear weather. The cities from Indianapolis through Cleveland OH, Rochester and Syracuse...
Seiko Designs Equatorial Sundial Watch
Sunday, 24 March 2024 01:42When is a watch not a watch? When it unfolds into an equatorial sundial. The watch, designed by Yu Ishihara is called a "Watch Exclusively for Sunny Men" and was part of a contest sponsored by Seiko to "help reimagine what a watch can be", aimed at creativity and perhaps for eventual production. Read about it at...
Rare Astrolabe Discovered by Chance in Verona Museum
Wednesday, 06 March 2024 00:17Dr. Federica Gigante, from Cambridge Univerity's History Faculty, discovered a rare astrolabe sequestered in a museum at Verona, Italy. Publishing in Nuncius (1 March 2024) Dr. Gigante presents "a hitherto unknown remarkable astrolabe from Al-Andalus which likely belonged to the collection of Ludovico Moscardo (1611–1681) assembled in Verona in the seventeenth century. The...
NASS 2024 Conference to be held in Vancouver, BC June 20-23
Friday, 23 February 2024 17:42The North American Sundial Society (NASS) will hold its 2024 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from Thrursday June 20th to Sunday June 23rd. The conference will be held at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, 900 West Georgia Street, Vancouver BC. The conference will start Thursday afternoon with a traditional reception and sundial door prizes. Friday will be a...
World Sundial Day
Friday, 23 February 2024 16:53Spanish sundialist Esteban Martínez has launched the resolution to establish the World Sundial Day to occur each year on the Spring Equinox. According to the petition circulated by Martinez, "Reason Sundials represent the union of disciplines as disparate as Astronomy, Mathematics, [and] Geography...They have an undoubted didactic value in teaching astronomy to young people and as...
NASS Course "Elements of Dialing" Starts Jan 6, 2024
Saturday, 18 November 2023 18:21NASS is pleased to announce the upcoming third instance of Elements of Dialing, our introductory course about sundials, their history, and the science that makes them work. The free 13-lesson course, intended for those are new to sundialing, runs from January 2024. The course coordinator will be Steve Lelievre, our Secretary and editor of The Compendium. Steve will be assisted from time to time...
Smithsonian Photo Contest - Jaipur Sundial
Sunday, 05 November 2023 16:30Smithsonian Magazine holds a photo-of-the-day contest. Winner on 30 Oct 2023 was Harita Sistu who took a photo of the large sundial of Jantar Mantar, Jaipur India (taken in July 2022). Harita notes: "I wanted to try my best to capture just how massive the instrument is and bring focus into the incredible skill that went into designing and constructing it." See other NASS...
Houston Pavilion - World's Largest Sundial
Friday, 14 July 2023 23:08A sundial or performance center or solar generator? It's all three. Called the Arco del Tiempo (Arch of Time), the design by Berlin architect Riccardo Mariano provides the projection of the sun's rays onto the ground through tinted glass apertures spanning the length of its arching ceiling. The elliptical shaped spots change every hour, telling "the solar time each day and delight visitors with...
Sun Tower Update
Saturday, 01 July 2023 00:36According to NewAtlas.com (https://newatlas.com/architecture/sun-tower-open/), construction of the Sun Tower exhibition building and outdoor theater is underway in the Chinese city of Yantai. The tower is being constructed by a French firm, Ducks Sceno and the engineering firm Arup, raising to 50m (164 ft) gracefully into the sky. The tower symbolizes the historic watch towers of...
Point of Infinity Hyperbolic Monument in San Francisco
Sunday, 25 June 2023 22:17Julie Baumgardner in The Art Newspaper of Jan 13, 2023 reports on the construction project of Point of Infinity, a nearly 70 foot (21m) hyperbolic cone will reach toward the sky as part of a 50 million dollar park development on Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island. In a competition held by the San Francisco Arts Commision on behalf of the Treasure Island Development Authority, Hiroshi...
Ice Sculpture Ephemeral in Time
Thursday, 30 March 2023 00:03In the Swiss mountains near the resort of Zermatt just beneath the Matternhorn, Stir World reports that "famed luxury Swiss watchmaker Hublot announced Daniel Arsham as its new ambassador, with a compelling piece of temporary land art. Aptly titled "Light & Time", the work is a Hublot-inspired 20-metre sundial resting in the shadows of the Matterhorn mountain." This sculptural is billed as...
A Sundial Without Hours
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Sad note: A recent check of Google shows that the dial was removed in early 2016 and the lot that supported garden education is now a housing complex.
In a small park at the intersection of Morningside Dr SE and Silver Ave SE in Alburquerque, NM. is a unique horizontal sundial designed for the Nob Hill Main Street program, where the 10-foot diameter sundial anchors the southeast corner of the Nob Hill Community Garden. Created several years ago by Mike Heighway and Mira Rose, Mike explains, "The purpose of the Nob Hill Sundial is to act as an interactive gardener’s guide. It works on an annual cycle by casting a shadow from a large center piece (the gnomon) onto a concrete plate with embedded steel [diurnal] bands and porcelain tiles that describe that month’s gardening activities."
The sundial acts as an educational tool for gardeners to show what to plant throughout the year, and when to harvest. Instructions are on porcelain tiles. There are a total of 17 tiles — one tile for each month of the year, one winter solstice tile, one summer solstice tile, one tile for both equinoxes, a centering tile (the tile which dictates the very center of the design), and a "hero" tile in the shape of a historic U.S. highway sign with information about contributors to the project. Most prominent is the acknowledgement of the Garden Design by Robert Strell and Grant Funding from the New Mexico Centennial Foundation.
Read more at http://www.mikeheighway.com/projects/nhsd.html
Czechs Visit Sundials in Poland
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Photo: PL 664 Sundial at School in Janowice Janowice Rybnickie just south of Rybnik
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The sundials working group of the Czech Astronomical Society in Hradec Králové organized a short study tour to Poland in June 2016 with a special emphasis on seeing sundials. This report is provided by Hohumil Landsman:
"The first stop was the Muzeum im. Przypkowskich, the world famous museum that began as the clock collection of the Przypkowski family. It is situated in the town square of Jędrzejów. As well as various fixed and portable sundials, the museum showed devices for the construction of sundials and several old books on astronomy and gnomonics."
"From there we visited the Planetarium and Observatory of Youth in Niepołomice. Among other things, there were commentaries available for blind visitors for whom the spoken word is a principal source of information. Another interesting stop was the Silesian Planetarium and Astronomical Observatory of Nicolaus Copernicus in Chorzów. In the courtyard of the planetarium there is a large sundial showing local solar time, and in the basement we found a seismological station containing two early 20th-century seismographs as well as their more modern equivalents. A meteorological station forms part of the same complex of buildings. As an additional diversion, we also visited the salt mines in Wieliczka."
Tattoo Sundial
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Woodruff (Woody) T. Sullivan III hosted two NASS conferences, one in 1998 and a second in 2011, each time showing many new Seattle sundials...most of which he had a helping designer's hand. Woody made T-shirts proclaiming "Seattle - sundial capital of North America". Now in the on-line University of Washington Today for December 1, 2016, Peter Kelley profiled Professor Emeritus Sullivan, noting the many worlds of interest by the UW astronomer and astrobiologist...including his passion for sundials. In Kelley's interview Woody expounded "My sundial interest began very specifically in 1991. I got interested because three years before we moved in to the new Physics-Astronomy building in 1994, the architects asked , what do you want? I'm thinking of my interest in history of science and art and design, so I casualy said, 'A sundial would be nice'. Since then, it's hard to believe - like getting married - that there's a phase in my life before that."
That UW sundial was a large vertical decliner, entered in the NASS Sundial Registry as Dial #117. But now a new precision sundial...using an arm tattoo. Woody explained, "This started with a paleontologist graduate student in the astrobiology program. She likes sundials and we got talking and over the last couple of years we designed [a tattoo sundial]. The idea was for her to have it, but she how has her degree and has since left town. Meanwhile I said to myself, dammit - that would be pretty neat. In April I gave a talk to the British Sundial Society about the technical details and showed the decal I'd made for my inner forearm. I'm going to write it up for their publication. The world's first working sundial tattoo!"
Read more at:: http://www.washington.edu/news/2016/12/01/the-many-worlds-of-uw-astronomer-and-astrobiologist-woody-sullivan/
Nantucket Sun d'Isle
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More than 25 years ago Robert diCurcio made a compound sundial. A small round horizontal dial is surrounded by a larger gnomonic dial engraved with hour lines in the shape of analemmas. Careful inspection of the dial shows that the lines are offset from the longitude of 70 degrees to account for the sun at the eastern time meridian of 75 degrees west. In "Yesterday's Island - Today's Nantucket" Katherine Brooks of the Maria Mitchell Association (MMA) takes a close look at the sundial in their front yard, sitting on the lawn of the Maria Mitchell Observatory on Vestal Street.
Here is a slight correction to the article's text: diCurcio set up the sundial perfectly level and oriented it so that the meridian-line is exactly north-south. [Hopefully aligned to true north, NOT magnetic north.] Once the dial is aligned the triangular gnomon will cast a shadow not only for the small horizontal dial telling east coast solar time, but the tip of the gnomon shadow points to the analemma, the “figure of eights”, which shows standard or daylight mean time (clock time). Installed by diCurcio, the sundial at the Maria Mitchell Association is accurate to this day. Brooks writes,"We hope you stop by the Maria Mitchell Vestal Street Observatory on Vestal Street to see the 1908 observatory built by the MMA and to test out the Sun d’Isle on the lawn in front. If reading shadows interests you, we encourage you to attend our Summer Speaker Series this Tuesday, August 30,[2016] to learn about the “Effects of Light at Night” with Dr. Mario E. Motta."
Compare the photo of the MMA sundial from Brook's article http://yesterdaysisland.com/what-is-this-a-sundial/ with the sundial photo above that appears in the NASS Sundial Registry at http://www.sundials.org/index.php/component/sundials/oneDial/513
Central Park Shadows
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Michael Lee's photograph of Central Park started it all. Erika Owen (TravelandLeisure.com) wrote "If you think Central Park is only good for its slightly quieter reprieve from the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple, you're missing out. As it turns out, the park can actually be used as a giant sundial. Understandably, this isn't a universally accessible perk of the park...you'd need to be in an airplane or helicopter to truly appreciate the functionality."
Any vertical ediface such as a tall building, a flagpole, or even the Washington Monument can become a gnomonic sundial measuring time by the tip of their shadow. But seeing those shadows on the ground results in fuzzyness of the penumbral shadow. The solution? Step back, way back to a perspective of seeing the shadows from high in the air. From this view these giant sundials become visible. Owen continues, "Billionaire's Row, the name given to the skyscrapers lining the two blocks south of the park between Fifth Avenue and Central Park West gives off plenty of shadows..."
To see the shadows in motion, Cube Cities presents a short video "Central Park Shadows". Cube Cities specializes in urban city representations and animation software to create them. For example they visualize the growth of cities as Manhattan from the 1920s and the growth of San Franciso from 1977 to 2015 and Chicago from 1862 to 2014.
The Soldiers Clock
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An analemmatic sundial was dedicated July 4th 2016 at noon in the Frontier Heritage Park at La Pine, Oregon. The Daniel and Crystal Richer Family Foundation created a simple but accurate sundial where one's own shadow tells the time. The sundial honors veterans and the unmentioned heros of our country. The plaque sums it all: "Always Remember".
The video is from KTVZ, Channel 21: http://www.ktvz.com/news/new-la-pine-sundial-to-honor-veterans/40269620
New Courthouse Sundial
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News Item from the Wet Mountain Tribune on June 30th, 2016: Custer County courthouse is getting a new sundial. Using a true north line surveyed by county commissioner Kit Shy, Charlie French is cementing a rod anchored in obsidian rock, whose shadow will align with that of the courhouse flagpole. "Taking advantage of the summer solstice on June 20, he literally nailed down the farthest reach of the flagpole shadow."
While French happily proclaims, “thanks to Harrison [whose clock allowed longitude determination in 1761], and knowing where the time zone meridian is, and how distant we are from it, we are accurate to one minute and 51 seconds of Mountain Time here in the visible solar time at the courthouse.” Well, that's almost correct. French's gnomon rod and courthouse flagpole shadows align at local solar time. Mountain Time like other clock times do not match solar time due to the tilt of the earth's axis and eccentric orbit around the sun, shifting solar and clock time by +/- 15 minutes throughout the year. Read more at: http://www.wetmountaintribune.com/home.asp?i=945&p=6
Japan Sundial House
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As reported in Design Bloom architect Kikuma Watanabe has designed a beautiful modern house integrating asundial and solar design principles: "The internal spaces support a comfortable environment where in summer it is naturally cool and in the winter it is warm. This ecological technology aids this passive system using the sun and the wind for an effective air conditioner."
The interior of the house has two-story rooms and lots of natural wood. But unlike other houses except perhaps for the Cosmic Room in Corregadora, Mexico, it has a built in equatorial sundial. Central stairs lead up to the equatorial dial projection area with the gnomon itself a glass slit window in the roof. But the most important aspects for solar comfort are the angles of the eve overhangs, preventing hot summer sun from entering the windows yet allowing warming sunlight to enter during the winter . Brighter areas such as the kitchen are situated in rooms with southern exposure while the living room faces east looking out upon ponds and hills. Upstairs surrounding the equatorial dial projection ring are two rooms: the Room of Sunrise and the Room of Sunset, and on the main floor facing north is the Room of Shadow.
Texas Christian University Gets New Dial
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Example of an Andrewes Longitude Sundial |
Texas Christian University (TCU) in Fort Worth Texas will unveil a new longitude sundial on May 5th, 2015. As William Andrewes, creator of the longitude dial explains, "The Longitude Dial is based on an idea proposed in 1607 by Franz Ritter of Nuremburg...Ritter devised and published a world map projected from Nuremburg, with its lines of longitude arrayed to serve also as hour lines. However, the difficulties of creating a new project for each location and the expense of producing it in durable materials were considerable. Ritter's gnomonic projection map does not appear to have been developed for use in sundials - until now." See Andrewes website at: http://www.longitudedial.com/index.html
One of Andrewes sundials will be unveiled in front of Walsh Performing Arts Center, situated in the middle of a circular stone plaza. Andrewes monumental sundial prices start at $50,000. Read more at TCU-360 news
As an interesting side note, the gnomonic project map upon which Andrewes creates his sundials was extensively used during World War II and into the 1950's by high frequency (HF) direction finding (DF) sites. On the gnomonic map not only are lines of longitude straight, but any great circle line of bearing is straight as well. Using a pin on the DF site, the lines of bearing could be drawn with an extended piece of string. Computer calculations eventually replaced the manual direction finding and geolocation method.