What's New Under The Sun
Houston Pavillion - World's Largest Sundial
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...
Sun Tower Update
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...
Point of Infinity Hyperbolic Monument in San Francisco
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...
Ice Sculpture Ephemeral in Time
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...
Register Now for NASS 2023 Conference
Monday, 16 January 2023 01:21
The NASS Conference comes early this year. Register now for the 28th annual NASS Conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan June 8-11, 2023
KensingtonHotel, Ann Arbor Michigan
Ann Arbor is best known as the home of the sprawling University of Michigan with its architecture, quadrangles, and bustling student life. Yet, it also boasts of great art, science, and archeological...
New Sundial for Kika Silva Pla Planetarium
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...
NASS Dialist Don Snyder Passes
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...
Today - Chicagohenge
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...
Indiana French Dial Found
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...
Interview with Sasch Stephens
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...
World's Smallest Sundial Gets a Lot Smaller
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...
Guiness Record for Smallest Sundial
Saturday, 28 May 2022 17:28
Perhaps the smallest sundial goes to IBM with the printing of a sundial in a corner of a computer chip. However it lacked a gnomon and could not really tell the time. However, Chen Fong-shean, a Taiwanese miniature craftsman, was challenged by the French astronomical society to beat the Guiness World Record for smallest sundial held by an Italian. The Italian dial created in...
TED Lecture - Sundials to Mars
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Bill Nye, The Science Guy gives a 7 minute TED-ED talk describing the excitement of creating sundials on Mars. http://ed.ted.com/lessons/sending-a-sundial-to-mars-bill-nye
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, a nonprofit organization devoted to spreading ideas of worth. Conferences are held each year with more than 50 guest speakers to motivate the audience on many different fields and now through YouTube, you can share the excitement of sundialing.
Curiosity Carries Sundial
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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”
THese two sundial enthusiasits have been 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-launched and 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."
Each home-plate color slice has a phrase describing what the mission means for human exploration. It reads:
“For millennia, Mars has stimulated our imaginations. First we saw Mars as a wandering red star, a bringer of war from the abode of the gods. In recent centuries, the planet's changing appearance in telescopes caused us to think that Mars had a climate like the Earth's. Our first space age views revealed only a cratered, Moon-like world, but later missions showed that Mars once had abundant liquid water. Through it all, we have wondered: Has there been life on Mars? To those taking the next steps to find out, we wish a safe journey and the joy of discovery."
Dr. Woody Sullivan discussed the history of the Mars Dials on a recent Sundial Digest forum (11 Aug 2012, Vol. 80, Issue 8) https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
“[Above] is the first image of the latest "Mars Dial", which indeed is the calibration device for the main camera ("Mastcam") on Curiosity Rover, which landed safely in Gale Crater on Mars 5 days ago (hurrah!)."
"The Mars Dials were originally fabricated in 1999 for the Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which landed in 2004, and the latter of which is STILL working over 8 years later. To date over 35,000 images have been taken of the two Mars Dials - the most photographed thing on Mars! As mentioned below, I was intimately involved in all aspects of making these calibration devices into working sundials - design, fabrication, operations, etc. However, because of other commitments I chose not to be part of any Curiosity efforts, so my report in the following paragraph is that of a (very) interested observer."
"In order to save some money, the Curiosity Mars Dial is a slight modification of one of the 6 copies that we made in 1999. A couple of magnets were added (to try to repel dust), new plates were put on it to change various wording such as the date and, in particular, the motto. The motto is now "To Mars To Explore" rather than the previous "Two Worlds One Sun". But the biggest difference is that, as far as I know, no one is ever going to superimpose the hour/date lines so that it can actually be used as a sundial! And yet NASA's publicity continues to call it a sundial.....But I'm still very happy to see the first images of it….”
The image here is from the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit (look carefully for the motto “Two Worlds One Sun”) and according to a NASA news release, “was processed by students in the Red Rover Goes to Mars program to impose hour markings on the face of the dial. The position of the shadow of the sundial's post within the markings indicates the time of day and the season, which in this image is 12:17 p.m. local solar time, late summer. A team of 16 students from 12 countries were selected by the Planetary Society to participate in this program. This image was taken on Mars by the rover's panoramic camera.” [Image was produced at Cornell University - Image Nr: PIA05017]
For more details of the Curiosity sundial, read an interview with Tyler Nordgren: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-08/mars-rover-curiosity and http://wtvr.com/2012/08/03/nasa-mars-rover-curiosity-will-land-early-monday/
Read more about Curiosity’s instruments at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/main/index.html
Curiosity Sundial Launched
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The spacecraft was launched toward Mars on 26 Nov 2011. Onboard Curiosity the camera calibration sundial has four edges each containing a panel of text and image, written by Jim Bell, planetary scientist from Arizona State University and the Mars Exploration Rover team with graphics designed by artist Jon Lomberg.
The digital camera and calibration target was created by Tyler Nordgren from the University of Redlands and a group of six scientists, astronomers, educators and artists worked together to create a digital camera that is calibrated to photograph the climate on Mars. On the team was Bill Nye and Professor Sullivan.
Dr. Bell now executive Director of the Planetary Society and Lomberg were both on the team that designed the similar sundials for the the Spirit and Opportunity Martian rovers. Artist Jon Lomberg has a long history in spacecraft graphics, starting with Design Director for NASA’s Voyager Golden Record and a long-time collaborator of Carl Sagan. He won an Emmy Award for his work as Chief Artist of the TV series COSMOS. Read more at http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/news/ci_19476230 and http://citizenofthegalaxy.com/wordpress/?p=169
ENEA Solar Compass Soon to be Smartphone App
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The National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) is an Italian Government sponsored research and development agency. In 2017 Sara Bollanti and her team at ENEA in Frascati developed a solar compass that "is 100 times more precise than magnetic compasses..." with applications for surveying, civil engineering, and for us, sundial alignment. The heart of the device is a combination of GPS receiver for determining both time and geographic position and a solar collector consisting of a narrow slit and a CMOS image detector. Essentially this is an electronic solar azimuth compass. A smallArduino computer uses the UTC time plus geographic coordinates to compute the local sun azimuth and then compares it to the position of the sun's projection of a slit on a CMOS detector. According to ENEA, the "...electronic solar compass is compact, completely automatic, cheap, and reaches an accuracy better than 1 arcmin. The latter is one of the best currently available values, comparable to those achievable by means of much more expensive and sophisticated devices, like coupled GPS systems (see for example U.S. patent 5,617,317A, 1997) or gyrocompasses. Furthermore, the ENEA compass provides the orientation in a few seconds, a time extremely shorter than that necessary for gyrocompasses."
By 2018 this was tested in Antarctica and now the mathematics has been reduced to fit into your smart phone. In April 2020 the ENEA team announced the developed the smartphone app i called "SunPass". It is currently in beta testing and will soon be available at the Play Store. In basic form, the app allows you to acquire the sun azimuth by pointing toward the shadow of a vertical object such as a building ("shadow method") or the shadow of a vertical pole ("gnomon method"). A more accurate appraoch is to construct a box with a slit on the front and hole on top such that the smartphone can observe the illuminated sun line on the floor of the box ("Slit method"). For the advanced, one can construct a precision holder from a kit that mounts on a tripod.
ENEA's goal of a low cost, simple method of precision alignment is now accessible to all. This new technology implements the mathematics of determining the sun's azimuth in elegant ways. But of course it only works on sunny days.
Read more at:
http://eai.enea.it/archivio/anno-2017/astana-italy/the-enea-solar-compass-how-to-catch-more-sun-by-using-the-sun
And watch the video:
https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/11352/1135216/Accurate-and-low-cost-ENEA-solar-compass-for-precision-metrology/10.1117/12.2555747.full?SSO=1
Daku's Shadow Writing
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Whether it be Delhi or Las Vegas, artist Daku brings shadows to life, creating words that slowing change their shape but never lose their meaning through the course of the day. As reported by mymodernmet.com, "As part of the St.Art festival, which curates public art in Delhi’s Lodhi district, Daku’s carefully realized [shadow] installation demonstrates the power of words. The artist, whose name means 'bandit' in Hindi, had been thinking about executing this project for several years when finally given the opportunity by the festival." The anonymous artist Daku told CNN, “I had to decide the size of the letters, the length of the pieces, and the angle I could place them in so pedestrians could easily see it.” mymodernmet.com concluded "The artist carefully selected which words to include—balance, order, reflection, future, seasons, space—each a reflection on movement, time, and change. Reaching its apex at mid-day, the letters slowly blur and dissolve, put to rest each evening before beginning anew."
The making of shadow writing in Las Vegas by Daku
Daku's cut-out words on the south facing walls of buildings is a clever implementation of sundial and involves a lot of subtle mathematics. Daku's lettering is placed on the wall horizontal to the ground, usually with very little change in the scale of the lettering. Mathematically the noonday lettering on the wall is lengthened by the tangent of the latitude plus solar declination. But the visible size of the lettering is foreshortened by the cosine of the upward look angle of the pedestrian on the ground.
Read more at: Daku's installation in Las Vegas and Daku's installation in Delhi
Digital Prescription
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As reported in the ArchDaily.com website on 23April 2016 by Patric Lynch, the design group Prescription in conjunction with Arup have developed a sophisticated sundial based on the analemmic path that the sun travels throughout the year. The classic "8" shaped analemma is made into a cone (think of someone stepping on an ice cream cone) and repeated with esthetic cutting of the cone top for each hour. At the bottom of the cone is a stenciled hour number and the angle of the analemmic cone only allows sunlight to poke through the stencil for the appointed hour.
The original prototype of this dial was made of flexible plastic through a 3D printing process. Prescription believes that "...the design is 100% scalable; the designers foresee applications for the design in both park and festival pavilions and home installations..."
A video of this analemmic sundial by Grisha Zotov can be seen at https://vimeo.com/161675472
3D Print Your Own Digital Sundial
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French inventor and maker of things Julien Coyne of Mojoptix has created an intriguing digital sundial gnomon that can be 3D printed. His software design (dated 13 October 2015) uses the 3D open software OpenSCAD described as "The Programmers Solid 3D Computer Aided Design Modeller".[http://www.openscad.org/about.html].
In a Mojoptix video [http://www.mojoptix.com/fr/2015/10/12/ep-001-cadran-solaire-numerique] (available in both French and English) the inventor describes how the digital gnomon shows digital time by making virtual "light tunnels" that burrow through a half-cylinder 3D software object. He accurately describes how a sundial works good (except of course for placing a penguin at the north pole) and how the "tiny tunnels" generate "a complicated Swiss Cheese" of holes and grooves that result in a gnomon that casts sunlight in a dotted pattern of numbers that change promptly every 20 minutes running from 10am (10:00) to 4pm (16:00).
The sundial is adjustable for any latitude and rotates slightly to accommodate daylight savings time, site longitude, or the date's equation of time (though no markings are made so making these angles are guesswork). His free, open software script allows 3D printing for either the Northern or Southern hemisphere.
For those who do not have a 3D printer, he makes the digital dial available from his on-line store for $54 USD plus shipping. Even with a fast 3D printer, the dial takes about 35 hours of printer time. This digital gnomon is a wonderful addition to both the world of dialing and 3D printing. The only down-side is that the dotted numerals have light tunnels placed too close together, resulting in an entrance angle of only +/- 15 deg. Since the sun annually moves +/- 23.5 deg in declination, this digital gnomon sadly won't work when the sun heads toward the summer solstice from about 1 May to 10 Aug and likewise blanks out in the winter from about 5 Nov to 5 Feb.
Digital Cube Beams Time
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Voshart's Digital Cube
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Chindōgu is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious things that are, well, Rube Goldberg. Daniel Voshart from Toronto has designed a solar time-telling cube from 59 stacked millboard plates. [See: Voshart Cube ] The result is a digital sundial, though not as universal as those patented Hines [USP 4,782.472], Scharstein [USP 5,590,093] or Kellogg [USP 05,596,553] but still, it is an interesting dial.
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