First off, thanks everybody for sending replies to my latitude/longitude and pronunciation emails! I didn't know how interesting all the dial list replies to the latter would be!
I think I have just figured out the analemma...I understood the sun's apparent motion vertically throughout the year, but never could figure out the rest of the "figure eight". After looking at www.analemma.com for awhile, I realized how the east/west motion is simply that our earth moves faster around the sun during some parts of the year, then slows as it drifts farther away and falls back towards it again. So a spin from sun-noon to sun-noon is slightly over/under 360 degrees... I think the analemma web site said that the reason was that our orbit was elliptical, but this was confusing to me. I now don't believe that's *quite* right--even if we orbited in a perfect circle around the sun, but for some strange reason moved at different rates in our orbit, we could still get the analemma effect. In reality, however, it's this elliptical orbit that causes the speed differences--we literally fall towards the sun, and slingshot back away until we slow down and fall back in. *wow* One question if anybody can answer--when was the analemma realised? That is, there must have been clocks that were known to be accurate, in order to prove the effect. Was it at this time that the phenomena was discovered, or was it discovered/would it be possible to be understood before then?
