Hi Gerard, I've had the most fun with modified cardstock vertical dials made with longitude and EOT compensation. They are modified by making sights to point at some distant point, like a particular mountan peak. The sights align the dial for north/south and up/down. It needs a second person to read the time though. they are a fixed latitude/longitude for the site and the curved time lines are good for an entire season. It is usually possible to find some distant point to sight on out here in the Pacific Northwest, usually from a countour map. I've not tried using Google Earth to find a sight point yet, but maybe that would work out. The various sight arms and gnomon fold out from the card stock, Both sides are printed. ( I usually glue one side on to add stiffness and make alignment of the two sides easier)
One of the cone dials that gives time to sunset would be a great addition to festivals out in flatlander country, but I never go there. :-) Floating altitude dials seem to be fairly popular. Have fun! Edley McKnight Date sent: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 11:36:02 -0700 (PDT) From: "Gerard Hughes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Sundial List" <sundial@rrz.uni-koeln.de> Copies to: Subject: Heliochronometer card dials? Ok, so I do realize that "heliochronometer" and "card dial" are sort of mutually exclusive. I´m looking for a way to make some easy to read card dials that read in standard mean time. I work at a number of historical reenactment fairs and I´d love a quick and portable way to show people how fun sundials can be and that sundials can be accurate. I have a number of universal ring dials but they read LAT. I´d like the dial to read in mean time because initially I´d like to be able to skip the explanation of Local Apparent Time vs. Mean Time and such. I realize that altitudinal card dials are not the most accurate, but since there is no such thing as a pocket Schmoyer dial I´m looking for an alternative that offers simplicity and a hook to catch people´s interest--and I'll be using them in the summer so the sun will have some altitude for the dial to discern. * I´m considering drafting latitude, longitude and date specific Capuchin dials corrected for daylight savings and the equation of time. I realize these dials would be one offs only of use at one location at one date, but since card dials can be drafted fairly easily this seems like a reasonable way to go. Granted, one can make a "universal" Capuchin dial that compensates for latitude and the time of the year, but such a dial still reads in LAT--Perhaps I could make two rotating hour wheels that line up with the hour scale to set for daylight savings, longitude offset from the center of the time zone and the equation of time (one for am and one for pm--I don't think there is a way to make a single wheel work) I´m wondering if people have any alternate suggestions and ways to make drafting more efficient on my Adobe CS2 equipped non-Intel Mac? (that is, I don't have Delta CAD at the moment.) Thanks, Gerard *Others may think that the path of the sun is fascinating as it is and doesn´t need to be equated with mean time, but I, personally, didn´t become fascinated by dialing until I discovered all the reasons why the dials I saw in parks didn´t read clock time and I assume that others may be dismissive of sundials for similar reasons. --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
