Dear All,
Happy Equinox
As well as grumbling about Daylight Saving Time
I do frivolous things like designing sundials...
I decided it was time that rather more of the
world knew about Babylonian Hours and Italian
Hours so, yesterday, I (and many others) put
up my latest creation on a south-facing wall of
Selwyn College, here in Cambridge (a place that
does its best to educate people!).
You can see some of the action at:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fhk1/SelwynPic.jpg
This photograph was taken at...
Hey, you can all work that out for yourselves :-)
It is fun how the scaffolding echoes the noon
crossing point on the equinoctial line :-)
It was the day before the equinox and you can
see that the shadow isn't quite centred on the
equinoctial line.
I still find it magical that you can fiddle
with all these sines and cosines and the end
result actually works!
The great thing about using sunrise and sunset
as reference times is that governments can't
change these times by legislation.
Hmmm. Maybe they can?
For more pictures and a non-technical account
written for the College in the early hours of
this morning you can look at:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fhk1/Selwyn.pdf
It is a shame it is cloudy now. The U.K. is
not a good place for sun :-(
Frank King
Cambridge, U.K.
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