What's New Under The Sun

Saturday, 18 November 2023 18:21

NASS 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...

Sunday, 05 November 2023 16:30

Smithsonian 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...

Friday, 14 July 2023 23:08

A 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...

Saturday, 01 July 2023 00:36

According 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...

Sunday, 25 June 2023 22:17

Julie 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...

Thursday, 30 March 2023 00:03

In 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...

Sunday, 18 December 2022 23:00

Sklar Bixby and Jeremy Meel, students at Santa Fe College in Florida took on a project to design and 3D-print a new sundial for the Kika Silva Pla Planetarium in Gainesville Florida (located on Santa Fe's Northwest Campus). Under the guidance of Dr. Philip Pinon, Sklar and Jeremy took on a semester long project as part of the Exploring Honors Mathematics class. They designed a horizontal sundial...

Saturday, 10 December 2022 17:41

Don Snyder, long time NASS member, sundial designer and conference organizer, died Nov. 21, 2022 at the age of 87. He organized two St. Louis conferences for NASS in 2008 and 2017. For the first St. Louis conference, Don worked closely with Michael Olsen of the Missouri Botanical Garden to have five sundials available for viewing, including the dedication of a dial donated by Ron Rinehard, the...

Thursday, 22 September 2022 20:41

The date is Sep. 22, 2022, the date of the fall equinox.  Although this is supposed to be the day of equal day and night, we know it's not exactly correct.  We measure daytime from sunrise to sunset, measured as the first and last light from the sun peaking over the horizon.  When we include sunrise and sunset plus atmospheric refration, at mid latitudes daylight wins by about 10...

Saturday, 27 August 2022 19:06

 Smithsonian Collection - Pocket sundial by Bourgaud of Nantes, 1660–1675. (MA.325565) From the National Museum of American History is an article about "How did a French pocket sundial end up buried in a field in Indiana?" published 20 July 2022 by Kidwell & Schechner.   It started in 1860 when Dr. Elisha Cannon, while plowing a field in Indiana, came...

Tuesday, 09 August 2022 21:32

What makes a sundial?  Practically anything.  Sasch Stephens discusses how he became interested in dialing.  Since then he has turned many objects into solar time devices.  It takes some creative thinking to invision how a common object can become a working sundial.  One of the most recent projects turned a 54 x 28 foot south side of a building it into a giant sundial...

Sunday, 12 June 2022 22:00

Dr. Jeremy Robinson, (Naval Research Laboratory, Electronics Science and Technology Division) combined efforts with his father-in-law, Prof. Woodruff Sullivan (Univ. of Washington Dept. of Astronomy) to construct the World's Smallest Sundial. The competition was sponsored by Cadrans Solaires pour Tous and their record is being entered into the Guiness Book of World...

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Members of The North American Sundial Society and Analemma Society will be participating in the 3rd USA Science & Engineering Festival.  Mark your calendars for Saturday and Sunday April 26 and 27th at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington DC. This is a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) exposition.  In recognition of the Festival’s role in making STEM a national priority, Congress recently designated the last week in April as National Science Week.

NASS and the Analemma Society along with other expo presenters have more than 3,000 hands-on activities.  NASS and the Analemma Society will introduce students and families to a variety of sundials and offering hands-on activities to cut them out and test them using a solar heliograph. It's all free. Come and learn about Sundials – The World’s Oldest Clocks.

The Science & Engineering Festival will also have a book fair—complete with signings by well-known science authors. Bill Nye the science guy will be there as well as Mike Rowe (Dirty Jobs on Discover Channel), Nate Bell (Design Squad on PBS) and the cast and crew from TV shows like Big. Bang Theory, as part of over 100 live stage performances.

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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:

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nass_news_2012_apr_USASEF_2On April 28-29, the North American Sundial Society and Analemma Society participated in the USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington DC, presenting “Sundials – The world’s oldest clocks” at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington D.C.

Photo shows opening day with Ken Clark and Jeff Kretsch helping students learn about sundials while parents look on.  A great first day at the Science and Engineering Festival. And the second day was equally exciting.

Parents, teachers, students, and children of all ages were able to participate in over 3,000 hands-on science and engineering activities.  On stage among many others was Bill Nye the Science Guy and Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, hosts of the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters.

Volunteers from the North American Sundial Society and The Analemma Society talked to over 1000 attendees about sundials, sundial history, and making paper sundials to show how sundials work

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Mark and Clare Hoggart have three daughters, all of whom attended and graduated from the Joseph Rowntree school in the UK.  Now, in appreciation, the Hoggarts have donated an analemmatic sundial to the school, saying, “It’s just a thank-you for getting the girls through their education. They have all got on really well and have blossomed into lovely young ladies. We want to thank them for the effort they have shown them as individuals.” The sundial has been installed outside the science block.

The Hoggarts, who own an ornamental gardenware company, have already received orders from others who are interested in a similar installation. See the NASS website on dial construction for further plans to build an analemmatic sundial.

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NASS and the Analemma Society, inspired by the success of the 2010 USA Science and Engineering Festival, are registering for the Festival on the Washington D.C. Mall.  The event, supported by volunteers from both NASS and the Analemma Society is scheduled for the Spring of 2012.

NASS and the Analemma Society will have a booth to teach families and children how to make sundials and read sundial time with the theme: Sundials, the Worlds Oldest Clocks.

We expect the return of many of the sundialist volunteers that supported the 2010 Festival.  For the coming year, we expect to improve our educational goals beyond the popular “Great Sundial Cutout.”  What else is in store?  Stay tuned as we formulate our educational material.  Have and idea?  Please send an email toRobert Kellogg

For more information on all Festival events and how you can get involved, visit  www.usasciencefestival.org.

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John Krieger, a former science teacher, is a strong supporter of STEM in the classroom and science in the real world. Bollards at Laguna Nigel in southern California might offer the opportunity to teach a bit of astronomy. 

Krieger Bollar Globe

John says, "I don’t mean to imply that every concrete curb stop should be turned into an astronomical instrument. But why can’t we have more of these things around us? The ‘globe sundial’ is not an original idea of mine. People have actually made them, but they are depressingly rare....Sometimes someone does go to the trouble of making a beautiful, scientifically literate public display, and places it in full view of the everyday public, and even provides instructions..." Krieger Cut Out CollectionMany of these public displays are sundials and during John's career, he developed aids to teach astronomy to schoolchildren. At his website, he makes an array of paper sundials, globes, astrolabes and quadrants available in PDF form for printing and easy constructing to make an accurate sundial or globe with explanation of how it works. "Most of them are printable PDF files that you can download and give to kids to label, cut out, and use as the basis of some activity... Officially, I am making all of these works available under a Creative Commons — Attribution License, which means you may do anything you like with them, as long as you give me credit as the creator."

And don't worry about adjusting for latitude. His paper instruments are available for download at every 10 degrees of latitude from 60 deg south to 60 deg north, which for example would be appropriate for use in Reykjavik, Iceland. In North America, 20 degrees covers lower Florida, 30 degrees is suitable for southern California, 40 degrees works for the big US east coast cities, and 50 degrees is appropriate for Calgary in the heart of Alberta.

Downloads available at: https://www.astronomyforthinkers.com/downloads/

For the Hemispherical Dial, go to: https://www.instructables.com/A-Hemispherical-Paper-Sundial/

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nass_news_2013_mar_SundialAtlasPaperdialsNeed a small sundial for your display or science project?  Want to show how different sundials cast shadows?  Need a simple cut-out science exercise for your students?  Fabio Savian of Milan Italy has the solution.  For a number of years he has managed the Sundial Atlas website, ever increasing the number of sundial photos from around the world.  Over the last several years he has worked very hard to create the gnomolab that includes a solar compass map of the earth, cloud software for creating analemmatic (human shadow) sundials, and a section for making paper sundials to your specification.  The analemmatic dial measurements and papger dial designs are created as download PDF files.  Four of those dials were created by the North American Sundial Society.  Enjoy. Sundial Atlas Paper Sundials

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nass_news_2011_nov_ConnetquotSecond-grade students at Connetquot Elementary School in Islip, New York, created sundials using paper plates and pencils.   The pencil gnomons were set mostly vertical by the students and then they traced the resulting shadows at three times during the day.  This helped teachers Leslie Davis and Melissa Love demonstrate the sun’s apparent movement in the sky and talk about the earth's rotation as the cause. "The students really had fun," said Love, "and they were able to recognize that a sundial is a tool that can be used to measure time."

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Students assemble sundialsAvid dialist and former The Grammar School teacher and head of the Putney, VT school, Mac Oglesby guides 6th graders to plan and construct their own working sundials. Oglesby's students learned how to correctly position their dials to display the accurate time throughout the year.

Attachments:
Download this file (NASS-SpiderSundial.pdf)NASS-SpiderSundial.pdf[ ]5611 kB

  1. Brief History of Sundials and How to Make & Use Them
  2. Solargraphy - Takes a while - But it's worth it
  3. Waterloo 3D Sundial Arches
  4. Teachers & Architects Draw Sundials
  5. Museo Galileo
  6. Sunlight and the 1918 Spanish Flu
  7. Stitch in Time
  8. Sundial as Functional Art