Sunday 18 February 2018

Analemmatic sundial in Williamson Park, Lancaster

We found another one of the DIY sundials in Lancaster. It is anlemmatic because the shadow maker (the gnomon) is vertical and not angled to the latitude. Vertical because it is a person. The upshot is that to get the shadow to fall correctly you need to stand in a different place each month. Here are the settings:

There were three things of interest:
1. It was set for British Summer Time. What a brilliant idea! When are the shadows likely to be best..
2. It has corrections given each month in minutes. The light curve was at the top but was very small.
3. An anlemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma is a figure of eight and yet the monthly track doesn't seem to represent that.