Dear All, I've read over the last couple of days various views on the sign for the equation of time.
To my mind, if you're faced with a sundial and EoT you want to know what the "real" time is i.e. watch time (an inflamatory remark if ever there was one!) Thus if you are at a time of year when you need to add minutes to the time indicated by the sundial to get watch time, I should expect the EoT to be positive. >From a practical point of view, Dial Time + EoT = Watch Time would seem to be sensible. To the best of my knowledge this is the convention my father uses on his dials (if it isn't I'll have words with him!). If the EoT took the oposite sign this would seem to imply that you were using it as a correction to watch time to get sundial time (Dial Time = Watch Time +EoT), but in this case if you have a sundial you could just go ahead and read it, and if you haven't, who cares what the dial time is ;-) David Higgon Putney London
