What's New Under The Sun

Monday, 16 January 2023 01:21

The NASS Conference comes early this year.  Register now for the 28th annual NASS Conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan June 8-11, 2023 KensingtonHotel, Ann Arbor Michigan Ann Arbor is best known as the home of the sprawling University of Michigan with its architecture, quadrangles, and bustling student life.  Yet, it also boasts of great art, science, and archeological...

Sunday, 18 December 2022 23:00

Sklar 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...

Saturday, 10 December 2022 17:41

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...

Thursday, 22 September 2022 20:41

The date is Sep. 22, 2022, the date of the fall equinox.  Although this is supposed to be the day of equal day and night, we know it's not exactly correct.  We measure daytime from sunrise to sunset, measured as the first and last light from the sun peaking over the horizon.  When we include sunrise and sunset plus atmospheric refration, at mid latitudes daylight wins by about 10...

Saturday, 27 August 2022 19:06

 Smithsonian Collection - Pocket sundial by Bourgaud of Nantes, 1660–1675. (MA.325565) From the National Museum of American History is an article about "How did a French pocket sundial end up buried in a field in Indiana?" published 20 July 2022 by Kidwell & Schechner.   It started in 1860 when Dr. Elisha Cannon, while plowing a field in Indiana, came...

Tuesday, 23 August 2022 14:17

The 2022 Sawyer Dialing Prize went to Frans Maes "for his creation of an introductory course on dialing, built on the idea of supervised self-study; for his successful multi-year running of that course in Europe; and for his inspiration of NASS’ development of a North American version.” Fred presented Frans with an award certification, the traditional cash prize of $250 and a custom made...

Tuesday, 09 August 2022 21:32

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...

Sunday, 12 June 2022 22:00

Dr. Jeremy Robinson, (Naval Research Laboratory, Electronics Science and Technology Division) combined efforts with his father-in-law, Prof. Woodruff Sullivan (Univ. of Washington Dept. of Astronomy) to construct the World's Smallest Sundial. The competition was sponsored by Cadrans Solaires pour Tous and their record is being entered into the Guiness Book of World...

Saturday, 28 May 2022 17:28

Perhaps the smallest sundial goes to IBM with the printing of a sundial in a corner of a computer chip.  However it lacked a gnomon and could not really tell the time.  However, Chen Fong-shean, a Taiwanese miniature craftsman, was challenged by the French astronomical society to beat the Guiness World Record for smallest sundial held by an Italian.  The Italian dial created in...

Wednesday, 25 May 2022 14:42

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...

Thursday, 05 May 2022 15:48

Hochshule KaiserLautern Observatory.  HSKL Photo When is an astronomical observatory not an observatory? When it's playing the roll of R2-D2.  According to Atlas Obscura, "A university in Germany [Hochschule KaisersLautern, University of Applied Scieces Kaiserslautern at the Zweibrücken campus] has transformed its hilltop observatory into the charming likeness...

Friday, 29 April 2022 16:12

NASS is saddened to report that longtime member Harold Brandmaier died on April 11, 2022.  Throughout his long life, besides his ever-present sundials, Hal enjoyed stained glass, ship models, photography, travel, folk dance, and playing the hammered dulcimer and hand drums – always in company with his beloved wife Ginny.  Hal had been a member since NASS founding and stepped in to help...

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Whether it be Delhi or Las Vegas, artist Daku brings shadows to life, creating words that slowing change their shape but never lose their meaning through the course of the day. As reported by mymodernmet.com, "As part of the St.Art festival, which curates public art in Delhi’s Lodhi district, Daku’s carefully realized [shadow] installation demonstrates the power of words. The artist, whose name means 'bandit' in Hindi, had been thinking about executing this project for several years when finally given the opportunity by the festival." The anonymous artist Daku told CNN, “I had to decide the size of the letters, the length of the pieces, and the angle I could place them in so pedestrians could easily see it.” mymodernmet.com concluded "The artist carefully selected which words to include—balance, order, reflection, future, seasons, space—each a reflection on movement, time, and change. Reaching its apex at mid-day, the letters slowly blur and dissolve, put to rest each evening before beginning anew."

nass news 2019 oct daku's shadow writing

The making of shadow writing in Las Vegas by Daku

Daku's cut-out words on the south facing walls of buildings is a clever implementation of sundial and involves a lot of subtle mathematics. Daku's lettering is placed on the wall horizontal to the ground, usually with very little change in the scale of the lettering. Mathematically the noonday lettering on the wall is lengthened by the tangent of the latitude plus solar declination. But the visible size of the lettering is foreshortened by the cosine of the upward look angle of the pedestrian on the ground.

Read more at: Daku's installation in Las Vegas  and  Daku's installation in Delhi

Click Here to See the Daku's Words Thru the Day

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As reported in the ArchDaily.com website on 23April 2016 by Patric Lynch, the design group Prescription in conjunction with Arup have developed a sophisticated sundial based on the analemmic path that the sun travels throughout the year.  The classic "8" shaped analemma is made into a cone (think of someone stepping on an ice cream cone) and repeated with esthetic cutting of the cone top for each hour.  At the bottom of the cone is a stenciled hour number and the angle of the analemmic cone only allows sunlight to poke through the stencil for the appointed hour.

The original prototype of this dial was made of flexible plastic through a 3D printing process.  Prescription believes that "...the design is 100% scalable; the designers foresee applications for the design in both park and festival pavilions and home installations..."

A video of this analemmic sundial by Grisha Zotov can be seen at https://vimeo.com/161675472

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3D Sundial Inventor Julien Coyne
 

French inventor and maker of things Julien Coyne of Mojoptix has created an intriguing digital sundial gnomon that can be 3D printed.  His software design (dated 13 October 2015) uses the 3D open software OpenSCAD described as "The Programmers Solid 3D Computer Aided Design Modeller".[http://www.openscad.org/about.html].

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Voshart's Digital Cube

Chindōgu is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious things that are, well, Rube Goldberg.  Daniel Voshart from Toronto has designed a solar time-telling cube from 59 stacked millboard plates. [See: Voshart Cube ] The result is a digital sundial, though not as universal as those patented Hines [USP 4,782.472], Scharstein [USP 5,590,093] or Kellogg [USP 05,596,553] but still, it is an interesting dial.