What's New Under The Sun
Preparing for the Solar Eclipse of April 8th 2024
Sunday, 24 March 2024 18:30There are lots of maps showing where to go for the April 8th 2024 total solar eclipse and others showing the statistical chance of clouds such as https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/02/22/april-eclipse-clouds/ From Little Rock Arkansas to the Mazatlan coast there is a high probability of clear weather. The cities from Indianapolis through Cleveland OH, Rochester and Syracuse...
Seiko Designs Equatorial Sundial Watch
Sunday, 24 March 2024 01:42When is a watch not a watch? When it unfolds into an equatorial sundial. The watch, designed by Yu Ishihara is called a "Watch Exclusively for Sunny Men" and was part of a contest sponsored by Seiko to "help reimagine what a watch can be", aimed at creativity and perhaps for eventual production. Read about it at...
Rare Astrolabe Discovered by Chance in Verona Museum
Wednesday, 06 March 2024 00:17Dr. Federica Gigante, from Cambridge Univerity's History Faculty, discovered a rare astrolabe sequestered in a museum at Verona, Italy. Publishing in Nuncius (1 March 2024) Dr. Gigante presents "a hitherto unknown remarkable astrolabe from Al-Andalus which likely belonged to the collection of Ludovico Moscardo (1611–1681) assembled in Verona in the seventeenth century. The...
NASS 2024 Conference to be held in Vancouver, BC June 20-23
Friday, 23 February 2024 17:42The North American Sundial Society (NASS) will hold its 2024 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from Thrursday June 20th to Sunday June 23rd. The conference will be held at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, 900 West Georgia Street, Vancouver BC. The conference will start Thursday afternoon with a traditional reception and sundial door prizes. Friday will be a...
World Sundial Day
Friday, 23 February 2024 16:53Spanish sundialist Esteban Martínez has launched the resolution to establish the World Sundial Day to occur each year on the Spring Equinox. According to the petition circulated by Martinez, "Reason Sundials represent the union of disciplines as disparate as Astronomy, Mathematics, [and] Geography...They have an undoubted didactic value in teaching astronomy to young people and as...
NASS Course "Elements of Dialing" Starts Jan 6, 2024
Saturday, 18 November 2023 18:21NASS is pleased to announce the upcoming third instance of Elements of Dialing, our introductory course about sundials, their history, and the science that makes them work. The free 13-lesson course, intended for those are new to sundialing, runs from January 2024. The course coordinator will be Steve Lelievre, our Secretary and editor of The Compendium. Steve will be assisted from time to time...
Smithsonian Photo Contest - Jaipur Sundial
Sunday, 05 November 2023 16:30Smithsonian Magazine holds a photo-of-the-day contest. Winner on 30 Oct 2023 was Harita Sistu who took a photo of the large sundial of Jantar Mantar, Jaipur India (taken in July 2022). Harita notes: "I wanted to try my best to capture just how massive the instrument is and bring focus into the incredible skill that went into designing and constructing it." See other NASS...
Houston Pavillion - World's Largest Sundial
Friday, 14 July 2023 23:08A sundial or performance center or solar generator? It's all three. Called the Arco del Tiempo (Arch of Time), the design by Berlin architect Riccardo Mariano provides the projection of the sun's rays onto the ground through tinted glass apertures spanning the length of its arching ceiling. The elliptical shaped spots change every hour, telling "the solar time each day and delight visitors with...
Sun Tower Update
Saturday, 01 July 2023 00:36According to NewAtlas.com (https://newatlas.com/architecture/sun-tower-open/), construction of the Sun Tower exhibition building and outdoor theater is underway in the Chinese city of Yantai. The tower is being constructed by a French firm, Ducks Sceno and the engineering firm Arup, raising to 50m (164 ft) gracefully into the sky. The tower symbolizes the historic watch towers of...
Point of Infinity Hyperbolic Monument in San Francisco
Sunday, 25 June 2023 22:17Julie Baumgardner in The Art Newspaper of Jan 13, 2023 reports on the construction project of Point of Infinity, a nearly 70 foot (21m) hyperbolic cone will reach toward the sky as part of a 50 million dollar park development on Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island. In a competition held by the San Francisco Arts Commision on behalf of the Treasure Island Development Authority, Hiroshi...
Ice Sculpture Ephemeral in Time
Thursday, 30 March 2023 00:03In the Swiss mountains near the resort of Zermatt just beneath the Matternhorn, Stir World reports that "famed luxury Swiss watchmaker Hublot announced Daniel Arsham as its new ambassador, with a compelling piece of temporary land art. Aptly titled "Light & Time", the work is a Hublot-inspired 20-metre sundial resting in the shadows of the Matterhorn mountain." This sculptural is billed as...
New Sundial for Kika Silva Pla Planetarium
Sunday, 18 December 2022 23:00Sklar Bixby and Jeremy Meel, students at Santa Fe College in Florida took on a project to design and 3D-print a new sundial for the Kika Silva Pla Planetarium in Gainesville Florida (located on Santa Fe's Northwest Campus). Under the guidance of Dr. Philip Pinon, Sklar and Jeremy took on a semester long project as part of the Exploring Honors Mathematics class. They designed a horizontal sundial...
Sunlight and the 1918 Spanish Flu
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1918 Photo of Camp Brooks Open-Air Hospital Boston - Nat'l Archives |
We feel the menance of the Corona Virus (Covid-19) and the imposed social isolation. Although worse than the typical annual flu, the Corona Virus pales to the worldwide pandemic of the Spanish Flu (isolated as the H1N1 virus). What does this have to do with sunlight? I am indebted to Richard Hobday's well researched article:
Here is his paragraph on "Sunlight and Influenza Infection"
"Putting infected patients out in the sun may have helped because it inactivates the influenza virus.[7] It also kills bacteria that cause lung and other infections in hospitals.[8] During the First World War, military surgeons routinely used sunlight to heal infected wounds.[9] They knew it was a disinfectant. What they didn’t know is that one advantage of placing patients outside in the sun is they can synthesise vitamin D in their skin if sunlight is strong enough. This was not discovered until the 1920s. Low vitamin D levels are now linked to respiratory infections and may increase susceptibility to influenza.[10] Also, our body’s biological rhythms appear to influence how we resist infections.[11] New research suggests they can alter our inflammatory response to the flu virus.[12] As with vitamin D, at the time of the 1918 pandemic, the important part played by sunlight in synchronizing these rhythms was not known."
Stitch in Time
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Sundials are often created at the instersection of science and art. Quilting has made its mark as well. For example in Burnsville North Carolina is the Quilt Block Sundial, painted in bright quilt blocks on a 8x8 foot board above the entrance to the Yancy Common Times Journal Building.
Now comes Altazimuth Arts, an enterprise established by Sara Schechner, well-know historian of science who is curator of Harvard's Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments. But Schechner is also active in the Studio Art Quilt Associates, Quilters' Connection of Watertown MA, and member of Quinobeguin Quilters guild. As she explains, "Recent quilts are inspired by history and the night sky, the built environment wet within nature, and by the many-faceted meanings of tangible things."
Illustrated is the US Naval Observatory 26-inch refractor made by Alvan Clark & Sons in 1873. "The inspiration for my quilt was an engraving from a newspaper story celebrating the work of the telescope. The print shows astronomer Simon Newcomb (at the eyepiece) and Superintendent Rear Admiral Benjamin F. Sands (standing) in the dome with the brand new telescope in late fall 1873. The engraving was based on a photograph of the same scene." Visit Schechner site at www.altazimutharts.com
Sundial as Functional Art
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This weekend on October 6th a new sundial was dedicated in Atlanta, Georgia. Ayokunle Odeleye, nationally renowned artist, has created a modernistic bronze and stainless steel sundial called “Chi Wara Sundial Lantern.” The 8-foot tall sundial is accessible at ground level, sitting in a 20-foot circular plaza with hour marks at the circumference.
Interestingly, it functions as a sundial by day, but shines as a lantern by night. The public artwork honors twelve community leaders from Cascade Heights located in southwest Atlanta for their spiritual and cultural contributions to their community and Atlanta.
Odeleye’s sundial took inspiration from Mali folklore of West Africa and the headdress of Chi Wara, a mythical creature that is half-man and half-antelope. As noted by the city of Atlanta, the sundial represents “a headdress in special ceremonial harvest dance designed to pass on knowledge from the elders to young people in the viliage. Odeleye’s ‘Chi Wara Sundial Lantern’ interprets this mythological image and conceptually uses it to suggest the ceremonial passing of scholarship from Cascade elders to the youth of this community."
Reference: Saporta Report - David Pendered - Oct 3, 2012
NASS Dialist Don Snyder Passes
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Don Snyder, long time NASS member, sundial designer and conference organizer, died Nov. 21, 2022 at the age of 87. He organized two St. Louis conferences for NASS in 2008 and 2017. For the first St. Louis conference, Don worked closely with Michael Olsen of the Missouri Botanical Garden to have five sundials available for viewing, including the dedication of a dial donated by Ron Rinehard, the Schmoyer sundial made by NASS member Bill Gottesman and donated to the Garden by Don and Bill, and in the Ottoman Garden, the Ottoman Sundial designed by NASS member Roger Bailey based on the 1845 dial at Topkapi Palace, Istanbul.
At the 2017 NASS conference in St. Louis, Don organized a ring-side seat at Jefferson Barracks to watch the total solar eclipse. Don worked with Perry County and Perryville, a town on the eclipse path, to create a new sundial for the courthouse gardens in honor of the eclipsing sun. Local craftspeople then created the dial following Don's design.
Don was always available to help other sundialists, offering advice and technical assistance. He helped restore a sundial at Concordia Seminary, established a Sundial Trail of dials around St. Louis, and for a decade checked the links on the NASS website for accuracy and relevance. With his hobby of woodworking, Don made a dial for the 25th anniversary of NASS (1993-2018) that projected solar time in colors on the dial face.
Don was a senior professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He was the Samuel C. Sachs Professor of Electrical Engineering and chair of the department from 1976 to 1986 as well as a professor of radiology at the School of Medicine. As the founding director of the Electronic Systems and Signals Research Laboratory from 1986 to 1998 he tackled imagery problems in biomedicine, astronomy and remote sensing. In the Washington University Newsletter, they noted that when the Hubble space telescope was launched and had a blurry focal plane, Don proposed a novel image reconstruction approach. A version of this sharpening algorithm has been used on all subsequent images.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/donald-snyder-obituary?id=38326477
https://engineering.wustl.edu/news/2022/Donald-Snyder-87-senior-professor-of-electrical-systems-engineering.html
Interview with Sasch Stephens
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What makes a sundial? Practically anything. Sasch Stephens discusses how he became interested in dialing. Since then he has turned many objects into solar time devices. It takes some creative thinking to invision how a common object can become a working sundial. One of the most recent projects turned a 54 x 28 foot south side of a building it into a giant sundial mural in association with Allied Arts and the talents of artist Gretchen Leggitt. The dial was dedicated on September 22, 2018. View his interview at https://sundials.org/index.php/videos/making-and-using-sundials
British Sundial Society Founder Christopher Daniel Passes
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NASS is saddened to report the passing of one of the UK’s pre-eminent sundial designer, Christopher St. J H Daniel who died on May 17, 2022. His works are to be found all over the UK, ranging from private commissions to major public works and to restorations and reconstruction of old and damaged sundials.
After a 13-year career at sea, Christopher Daniel joined the staff of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich in 1964, working in the Department of Navigation & Astronomy. From 1967 onwards, his early curatorial responsibilities encouraged him to make a particular study of sundials and dialing literature. Christopher designed the now well- known "dolphin" equinoctial mean-time sundial at Greenwich, celebrating the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. In 1989 he and three others founded the British Sundial Society. From 1990, Christopher served as its Chairman, and more recently as President. His expertise and artistry in sundial design will be missed.
Netherland Sundial Society Founder Passes
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Frans Maes of the Netherland Sundial Society writes: "We deeply regret to inform you that Hans de Rijk, founding member in 1978 and honorary member of the Netherlands' Sundial Society, passed away on November 23, at the age of 95. He served in the Board of the Society for many years and wrote some 150 articles in its Bulletin. Among these were important contributions, such as a latitude independent sundial, and the family of equator projection dials. A more playful result of his creativity were 'postcard dials', which he used to design while waiting for his Chinese take-away dinner."
"Hans was a popularizer of mathematics and astronomy and wrote many books about these subjects, under the pseudonym Bruno Ernst. His motto was: "Nescius omnium curiosus sum", I don't know anything but I am anxious to know everything. His eagerness to learn was equalled by his striving and ability to teach. He has been a teacher of mathematics and physics, founded the mathematics magazine 'Pythagoras' and the physics magazine 'Archimedes', aimed at secondary school students. He founded the first public astronomical observatory in the Netherlands. He also founded the organization 'Ars et mathesis', where art and mathematics meet, and its magazine with the same name. He became friends with the famous Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher and wrote several books about Escher's work. Later on, he wrote extensively about impossible figures."
"Planetoid 11245 bears his name.".
"We lose a generous, inspiring, modest and productive diallist and friend."
The Netherland Sundial Society web pages is available in English at: https://www.dezonnewijzerkring.nl/pages/en/welcome.php?lang=EN
Sundial Garden Sprouts in Vancouver
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He may be wheelchair bound, but that doesn't diminish Tom Laidlaw's enthusiasim for sundials. In front of his house on Carolina Lane is the Vancouver Heights neighborhood landmark - a sundial garden. And what has he planted?
There is a bright circular equatorial sundial that shows the time from 4am to 8pm (and even an offset for daylight saving time). On the grass is an analemmatic sundial sundial marking time from 6am to 6pm for anyone who wants to stand to the plywood walkway. On a table near the house are a series of globe, equatorial and horizontal sundials as well as other sundial types that he will gladly explain. For example, Tom has turned a skate board into a polar dial by adding a "T" gnomon in the middle. And then there is a model of the Jefferson dial where you swing the gnomon around a globe to cast only a thin line shadow
Katie Gillespie, of the Columbian, reports "The 80-year-old retired electrician has always been a 'do-it-yourself kind of guy,' he said. For a while, it was skateboards he fancied, and bookshelves, and a Benjamin Franklin chair that transforms from a chair into a stepladder. He’s self-taught, he said, researching new projects online, then diving in.... 'It’s fun to watch him talk to people about it,' said Debra Brouhard, Laidlaw’s daughter and neighbor."
His latest obsession is sundials. As a member of the North American Sundial Society, Tom now designs a multitude of sundials. Visitors see his yard dotted with all types of sundials. They come in all sizes: big and small. His analemmatic sundial on the lawn always draws attention. Nearby, a plumb bob dangles from a beam. allowing Tom to tell time solar noon. when the shadow draws a line on the lawn pointing due north.
Gillespie found that, "Laidlaw’s passion for sundials began in 2009, when his grandson, Doug Brouhard, stuck a stick in the ground while they were camping. Doug Brouhard was about 12 at the time, and the dial didn’t quite work, Laidlaw said. It was the right idea, though, and a new hobby was born. 'I still have the stick that started it all,' Doug Brouhard said."
Read more of Katie Gillespie's article and see more photos of Tom Laidlaw and his sundials at http://www.columbian.com/news/2017/aug/30/sundial-garden-shines-in-vancouver-heights/
BSS Sundialist and Webmaster Passes
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Richard Mallet at Cornell Univ. Sundial |
Richard Mallet, former British Sundial Society Trustee, Council Member and former BSS Webmaster passed away on Nov 7th, 2016 with funeral held on Dec 12th, 2016. He lived in Eaton Bray, UK and had many interest in physics, mathematics, and sundialing. Those of us maintaining websites know of the difficulty in perserving order, yet always allowing for expansion of new material. "After a near disaster with the [British] Sundial Society's then heavily modified and entirely non-compliant website, Richard stepped in at no charge to the Society to rewrite it using the then new Expression Web software from Microsoft. This proved very successful and was of course fully W3C compliant."
Over the next year, the North American Sundial Society website will migrate from an older version of the Joomla Content Management System to the fully maintainable Joomla 3.x version. The majority of content and organization will remain intact, but new innovations are expected.
Read more about Richard Mallet's life at: http://www.ppowers.com/mallett.htm