Dear Sundialists: I am not an sundialist, but I happened upon what I believe to be a most important and unique sundial. You may be aware of the Flight 93 memorial called the Crescent of Embrace. The design contained overt Islamic imagery (a large crescent and star, as on an Islamic flag). This caused many people to object, which forced the architect to reconsider his plans, even though he claimed that there was no religious meaning in his design. Looking closely at the PDF's for the Crescent memorial, I believe that the architect was not being honest.
Part of what I found is what appears to be a cleverly hidden Islamic sundial--a version of a "hafir"--using the memorial's Tower of Voices as its gnomon. The tower is surrounded by an array of ellipsoid and crescent shaped lines of trees. By my calculations, the innermost ellipse of trees marks the times throughout the year for Islamic afternoon prayers, which are determined by shadow length. But the design is hidden and quite tricky. The Tower is not a single height gnomon. It has a vertical slot down its spine that allows light through, but only before the sun's azimuth has reached a certain point (225 degrees clockwise from north). Once afternoon prayers start occuring before this azimuth has been reached (November 1st) the relevant tower height becomes the bottom of the slot. My calculations are substantial and I need to find someone, perhaps a few people, who are willing to check my analysis. Also, I saw in an article by de vries, Oglesby and Maddux that they knew of no examples of a fixed-position hafir. Thus it seems likely that the hidden hafir in the Crescent memorial (if it can be confirmed to be such) is something new under the sun. Not only is it a fixed-position hafir, but it has this tricky dual-height gnomon, seemingly incorporated to hide the sundial's nature from those who would object to an Islamic religious construct in a memorial to forty Americans murdered by Islamic extremists. This is all very interesting to me, and I am not even a sundialist! If anyone wants to take a look, I have posted a substantial initial report on the Tower-sundial at http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2005/10/crescent-tower-is-islamic-prayer html. In addition to my calculations, it has links to the site plan PDF's and other useful resources. Sincerely, Alec Rawls P.S. Thanks to NASS Webmaster Bob Terwilliger for directing me to this list. -
