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. --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial