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...
Remembering 9/11 at Tampa Memorial
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It has been 17 years since 2001 when on September 11th terrorists attacked the world trade center and the Pentagon. To memorialize this tragic event artifacts from the Word Trade Center are now in 1,100 cities, large and small, across the country that have received portions of the Trade Center wreckage from the Port Authority of New York. In Tampa along Bayshore Boulevard near Bay Boulevard is a striking memorial. Here is a World Trade Center in miniature, represented as two tower outlines, matching the orientation and scale of the site in New York City. Thin aluminum members rise from the memorial base, tracing the placement, material, and proportions of the twin towers. The memorial is one one-hundreth the scale of the actual towers and site. The memorial was dedicated on Friday, September 9th, 2018.
Interviewed by Fox 13 News of Tampa, John Thompson of Wilder Architect who designed the memorial explained, "So we put [the steel I-Beam from the Tower, setting] it standing straight like the column in the North Tower, symbolically." Thompson continued, "The column for the World Trade Center acts as a sundial...There's a portion of concrete base that in the morning of September 11th when the shadow of the column hits that particular piece of concrete, that's the [time of] impact of the plane on the north tower. As the morning carries on, when the column shadow falls off the concrete, that's when the building fell." American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center at 8:46am. After burning for 102 minutes, the north tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, killing approximately 1,400 people.
According the Fox 13 News, "It's a place where joggers stop to pray and groups stop to reflect, such as the Bayshore Patriots, an organization where members stand at its corner every Friday to wave the U.S. flag at commuters. Thompson invites everyone to come out the morning of 9/11 and see the sundial."
Read more at:
http://www.fox13news.com/news/local-news/memorial-functions-as-a-sundial-tells-story-of-911#/
http://www.publicartarchive.org/node/54627
https://www.tampagov.net/news/city-tampa-dedicate-911-world-trade-center-artifact-memorial-be-installed-patriots-corner
Forest Park Memorial Dial
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On June 6th 2018, an interest memorial sundial was donated to the Clifford A. Phaneuf Environmental Center at Forest Park, MA just off U.S. 91 and a stone's throw from the Connecticut River. According to Mass Live (https://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2018/06/new_sundial_at_forest_park_env.html), "During the public ceremony, the sculpted sundial was donated by the family of retired Hampden County Housing Court Judge Edward C. Peck Jr. and dedicated in memory of Peck's late wife, Ruth Mahoney Peck." The Peck family commissioned sculptor James Kitchen who created a run-patina steel sundial with the base of an old mill circular saw blade and setting a pipe wrench and ice skate blade welded together as gnomon. According to Burt Freedman, a retired teacher of the Environmental Center for Our Schools at Forest Park, the dial provides references to the industrial and agricultural history of Springfield and Forest Park.
The Hour Lines are short vanes of steel raised about 1" above the circular saw blade. A slight dome extends from the hour line circle to the center where the sundial gnomon sets. Although the 6am-6pm line meets the base of the gnomon, the fact that the gnomon is raised 2 or more inches above the saw blade, sets the virtual foot of the gnomon far back of the 6-6 line. Thus, although the sundial is esthetically beautiful and represents history of the area, perhaps it tells time with considerably more error than expected from the Equation of Time. [No longitude correction is provided, resulting in nearly 10 minutes of constant error.]
Arc of Memory
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A memorial, the Arc of Memory, will be completed in 2018 on the west side of the Garden of Provinces and Territories in Ottawa. The design by Paul Raff's Sutdio is a "living calendar". Raff described the memorial as a way to “honour the 8 million Canadians that can trace their origins to countries that suffered oppressive regimes of communism by creating an instrument of memory.” In essence Raff is designing a huge digital sundial (or as he calls it, a "three dimensional calendar"). According to Erin Dommely of Azure Magazine, the memorial is constructed of two curving walls 4 x 21 meters containing 4,000 short bronze rods arranged in 12 dense rows across a series of 365 stainless steel fins. Erin describes the Arc of Memory's principle of having each rod uniquely angled towards the sun, whereby each hour of the day is illuminated each day of the year.
The two walls are split at the winter solstice and "On the darkest day of the year the design would invite visitors to step through in a metaphorical journey from darkness and oppression to lightness and liberty.”
Read more at: http://www.azuremagazine.com/article/memorial-victims-communism-design-revealed-ottawa/
Rochester Bicentennial Sundial
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Rochester, Michigan was settled in 1817 and is now celebrating its Golden Centennial with a sundial. The city is on the northern outskirts of Detroit, with more than thirteen thousand citizens. According to Natalie Broda, Rochester City Council approved $190,000 for the sundial, but the cost of the project is expected to exceed that due to the unstable, uncompacted ground that the heavy monument will sit on." The dial will be unveilled as part of the bicentennial homecoming envent scheduled for August 12, 2017.
Broda continues,""The sundial is the brainchild of Rochester’s city beautiful commission, which had been mulling the project over for several years according to Nik Banda, deputy city manager. The project was chosen after a request for proposals was sent out from city council." The sundial design was done by Russell Thayer, a sculpture artist from Franklin, Michigan.
The 20-foot tall gnomon of triangular cross section will be constructed with weathering steel, otherwise known as corten steel. Broda notes that this material was chosen to pay homage to the steel used throughout the old knitting mills of historic Rochester.
aewinc.com describes the surrounding hour marks as part of "Twenty stones [each weighing over 1000 pounds] within and surrounding the plaza have been carefully sited to celebrate twenty decades of history. The decorative stones are indigenous to Michigan and have colors that complement the gnomon; they will serve as both seating and focal elements, as well as [hourly] time markers for the sundial. Historic plaques will be placed on the stones highlighting historic events which occurred during each of the twenty decades." To increase the historical retrospective, reclaimed 100-year old bricks from historic Main Street buildings will be used to complete the circular plaza around the sundial monument.
Washington Monument Sundial
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Today it is snowing in Washington DC and it brings to mind a winter some 43 years ago when the Washington Monument was turned into a sundial. Over the years many have proposed turning this spiring monument into a sundial. For example at the first North American Sundial Society (NASS) Conference in 1995 Robert Terwilliger drew a map of the shadow's excursion from Independence Avenue to E Street NW, repeated here at left. In June 2011 in the NASS Quarterly Journal The Compendium Robert Kellogg suggested that "...the precise shadow lines drawn in [Terwilliger's map] are precise geometrical constructs. The problem is the sun is not a point source, but a disk about 1/2 degree in diameter. The result is the sun casts a penumbral (partial) shadow when it is partially obscured, resulting in a range of light to dark sunlight that blurs the edges of shadow, making a gradient from light to dark.
To get a feeling for the impact of the penumbral shadow from the Washington Monument, we start with a brief summary of the Monument: A competition was held in 1836 and won by architect Robert Mills who designed a tall obelisk. Excavation began in early 1848 and the cornerstone was laid as part of the 4th of July ceremony by the Freemasons. Lack of funds created a hiatus in construction in 1858, and finally the capstone to create a pyramidal point to the obelisk was laid December 6th, 1884. The obelisk as we see it today is 169.29 meters tall, 16.8 meters wide at the base and 10.5 meters wide at the start of the capstone pyramid. The pyramid itself is 17m tall, with a small aluminum capstone at the tip and by the time the sun is sufficiently blocked by the top of the oblesk for us to see the shadow, the sun is well below the tip.
Campbell University Sundial Commemorates Math Professor
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Mathematics professor Jerry Duncan Taylor passed away in 2013, but his 46 years of teaching lives on at Campbell University in Buies Creek North Carolina just south of Raleigh. A commemorative sundial in front of Taylor-Bott Rogers Fine Arts Building was dedicated on Wednesday, March 21, 2016.
The highly polished dial, approximately 12 inches square, with an inclined bar gnomon sits on a plinth embedded in a low brick wall for all to see. There are time marks for every 10 minutes, with standard time given as Roman numerals and daylight savings time one hour later given in larger Arabic numbers.
Professor and mathematics department chair Meredith Williams recalled the start of his teaching career at Campbell: "I'm not sure I would have made it through my first semester without Dr. Taylor. I had an extremely challenging group of students in a class who were determined to see how hard they could push the new professor. Dr. Taylor always had an encouraging word for me before I went to class."
Rachel Davis quoted Provost Mark Hammond from the sundial dedication (http://www.campbell.edu/news/item/sundial-dedicated-to-late-math-professor) "We wanted something physical that we could see, celebrate, and reflect on him and the good man that he is and the way he has touched many of the people here... [his] very inspired spouse, Louise Taylor, thought that perhaps we could memorialize Jerry through a sundial. It gives us the time to pause and reflect and think about Jerry."
Southern Arkansas University Dedicates Sundial
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The large analemmatic sundial in front of the Harton Theater North Entrance of Southern Arkansas University (SAU) is being formally dedicated on Thursday, November 5th, 2016 in memory of the late David Thomas Smith, a 1957 SAU alum and retired assistant director of the SAU Physical Plant.
The Smith Sundial, funded by family and friends of David Smith was built by the SAU Department of Art and Design and engineers of the SAU Physical Plant. Patrick Finney was the construction supervisor and Steven Ochs was the project concrete art designer and craftsman. As described in the NASS Sundial Registry, Dial #800 is "a 22 by 17 foot analemmatic dial of stained concrete with Arabic hour numerals of polished brass. The dial perimeter and hour numerals are set in a blue decorative polymer "U" arc, appearing as a large mule shoe that represents the university Muleriders mascot symbol. Dial colors represent the royal blue and gold school colors."
As reported by Southern Arkansas University, "The Smith Sundial at SAU is one of only four Arkansas sundials that are registered on the North American Sundial Society, and the only one outside of Little Rock and North Little Rock. It is also the only sundial in the state that is [a monumental] analemmatic..."
Read more at: https://web.saumag.edu/news/2015/10/28/sau-to-dedicate-smith-sundial-on-nov-5/
November 11th Veterans Memorial
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Anthem Veterans Memorial
Sun Alignment on Nov 11th
[photo: Anthem Veterans Memorial Committee and Mike Spinelli]
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The Anthem Veterans Memorial in Anthem, AZ was dedicated on November 11, 2011 at 11am (11-11-11 11:11:11) to honor the service and sacrifice of the United States armed forces and to provide a place of honor and reflection for veterans, their family and friends. Veterans gather here annually on November 11th to watch a solar alignment at 11:11am when the sun precisely illuminates The Great Seal of the United States. The memorial was designed by Renee Palmer-Jones, and constructed under the guidance of Project Engineer Jim Martin and construction expert Steve Rusch.
VLA Sundial Memorial
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Bracewell Memorial Sundial at VLA
Photo Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF
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In 1961 Professor Ronald Bracewell at Stanford University created an X shaped array (called a “Chris-Cross array” for W.R. “Chris” Christiansen) using 32 10-foot diameter dish antennas to form a radio spectroheliograph nestled in the hills of Palo Alto, California.