Hello Mac,
Did I see you doing a fly-by on Saturday? If you did and were looking
down at the Porter Turret Scope you saw me! This was my first visit to
Stellafane so I can't speak with any real perspective on it but what I saw
has made me want to return. For those interested the URL for the Stellafane
Convention is given below and should eventually lead to the winners of this
years various competitions. The whole "happening" was well worth the trip and
the weather couldn't have been better.
http://www.stellafane.com
I did some research while there which led me to the son of Donald A Patch
who sold Porter's Garden Telescope some years after it had been discontinued,
quite a character! I passed the information on to the author of a biography
on Porter, Berton Willard, a long standing member of Springfield Amateur
Telescope Makers, the club that owns and operates Stellafane and which was
originally founded by Porter. A copy of Willard's Porter biography can be
purchased through Willman-Bell.
http://www.willbell.com
Porter's Garden Telescope by the way was advertised as Sundial capable,
it was what might be called an "active" instead of passive sundial. The
telescope was moved in equatorial mode (it could function in alt/azi too)
until a complete image of the Sun's disk was formed on a piece of paper at
the focal plane of the eyepiece. Then the Right Ascension (hour angle) was
read and with a correction for local longitude and the equation of time
Standard time could be calculated. This can be done with any equatorial
mounted scope. An article p75 of October's 1996 Sky and Telescope gives a
good account of the Garden Telescope.
Most of the sundials that I saw were in the Stellafane museum at Hartness
House, including a dial designed by James Hartness who was a major benefactor
of Porter's and the ATM movement in general. The Hartness dial employs a very
interesting and sophisticated mechanism to allow the reading of Standard
Time. They did have one of Porter's dials "up and running" at the clubhouse
on Saturday, an equatorial dial. Also, an Arabic Compendium was shown next to
the Porter Turret Scope on Saturday, Mr. Tremberger its builder, told me he
would soon have a page up on it, when I get it I'll pass it along.
Combing through old Scientific American articles on microfilm I have
found some very interesting articles on Sundials including at least two
authored by Porter. Porter designed at least 19 dials (probably much more)
many of which were a true advance in the art. While back East and after over
a year of sporadic research, I found and purchased an original Porter Sun
Clock that employs a focussing lens, its a wonderful piece. It was made while
Porter was in Pasadena, which as Richard Koolish has pointed out, was the
period in which Porter was employed on the Palomar Project. I plan on
registering it with NASS, which last time I checked, has no inventory of
Porter dials. During this time Porter also designed a dial for the Cal-Tech
campus, which was later stolen. Cal-Tech has a web page asking for its
return, the URL is listed below. The Cal-Tech dial also appears in Winthrop
Dolan's book "A Choice of Sundials", p134, it doesn't give credit to Porter
as its designer however.
http://www.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/arctohtml?30.19-1
Although Stellafane is a telescope related event it was a good
opportunity for me to look further into Porter's work with sundials, which he
most definitely contributed to. I plan on bringing at least one dial to
Stellafane next year and would encourage anyone else to do so as well.
Regards,
Luke
Mac Oglesby wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> Apparently some members of this List attended the meeting at Stellafane.
> Any details on the sundials exhibited would be appreciated by those of us
> who weren't able to be there.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mac Oglesby
