Sundial Project Update

Met with two representatives from the city, and one from the Parks Dept., last Thursday on the sundial project. They were all very nice, very supportive. Most of the hoops I need to jump through now are reasonable ones: submit a letter of intent; give them a diagram to make sure I'm not digging up electrical lines, sprinkler pipes, etc.; and submit a list of all materials I will need. I'm awaiting a .pdf of the park itself so I can plop the diagram below on top of it, align it, and send it back to them.



I got the layout from a wonderful site in Denmark: http://www.jgiesen.de/hsd/hsd300.html. Just put in your own longitude and latitude, print the result on graph paper, and you got yourself a blueprint. I love the fact that it's simply two flowing lines: an ellipse and a figure eight. The final product will be about 18 feet by 9 feet. 12 markers along the upper half of the ellipse. A 2 x 6 ft. slab for the figure eight.

Anyone wanna throw me a fancy-pants name a little more colorful than "the sundial project" I'd be delighted to hear it.

Gnomonics

No, it's not the study of gnomes.

There is a dull, barren triangle across the street from our house and I am trying to convince the city to let me build a sundial there. I emailed them, they emailed me back and are ready to set up a meeting with me and as many of my neighbors as I can drag with me. Now that they've called my bluff, I'm in the process of learning how to build one.



There are lotsa different kinds, and you can get lost in the details fairly quickly. The easiest to build would be the one pictured above: find true north, put up the pole (it's called a "gnomon") at the appropriate angle, pour the concrete, measure the angles and put down the marker lines. You can get the angles for your latitude at many different sites.



The one above is the one I'm gonna push for. A human sundial! You stand on the month, and your shadow tells you the time! Much cooler, but the process is quite a bit more complex, as you've got to figure out the standing positions for each month, and I can't quite figure that part out yet. There are companies out there who will sell you the layout, but no place I've found that will allow you to calculate the values themselves.

Here's a picture of a finished one.



Of course, were I a little more ambitious, I'd build me one of these.



Anyone have an idea of how to calculate positions for the human sundial (I think they are called "analemmatic" sundials), gimme a shout.