Hi Walter, It doesn't seem like you added a copy of your letter to the sundial list. You might want to do that, if you haven't. (I'm doing it in this reply) It is nice to meet you and have you aboard the list. Your letter was interesting and the area where you live seems amazing.
My feeling about Time and time' are: Time, the serious scientific, boringly uniform process and time' the wonderful set of companion processes that varies as we pass through the years and that we can fit our desired processes into agreement with. The earth's rotation, tilt and elliptical orbit around the sun add small amounts of variation each day, these accumulate to over a quarter of an hour variation from the boring process of scientific Time. ( plus nearly constant items like longitude differences, daylight saving times, politically determined time zones, etc and small rather random bits.) Some of the charts show fast as up, some fast as down. Some charts call Time being in error, some time'. Most of life seems to be the process of meshing desired processes into the flow of other companion processes while minimizing the effect of antagonistic processes. If that makes any kind of sense to you. The sundial marks out a measure of some of those companion processes that we all enjoy in our lives. (I know that there are all kinds of scientific measures of Time as well.) It is like that. Invent a new measure of some kind and the old ones don't go away. Some of the old ones are more comfortable for some purposes. I find, from my elbow to my finger tips is exactly a Cubit and have joy in measuring things in Cubits, fists, fingers, hands and feet. :-) All the great pieces of sundial and astronomy software are constant sources of great delight. I use Shadows a fair amount. Fer de Vries and Gianni Ferrari's programs are also great. The NASS repository on CD contains a number of them. Enjoy the Light! Edley McKnight [43.126N 123.357W] Roger Wrote: > Hello everybody, I am new on this list. I am an electronics engeneer, now > retired, next january I begin my 66th year; my name is Walter Jonckheere, > I am Belgian & live in the center of Belgium in part of a 400 year old > farm, so my house is old indeed, we found cannon balls of the Napoleon war > in our garden, because Maréchal Grouchy whom Napoleon was waiting for in > Waterloo, was fighthing the prussians around my house. But enough of this > history. When on retirement I started a keen interest in antique clocks & > watches, of which I have now a nice collection. I learned how to repair & > retore & bought all the necessary tools. Old clocks brought me to sundials > because I started thinking on how the people in the past adjusted their > clocks to the right time, sundials of course was the answer & they were > very clever in designing those. But, imagine, in a country like France, > rather big in longitude and latitude, a clocksmith near the atlantic ocean > would set his clock to his sundial & another near the swiss border to his > personal sundial, so both clocks showed the local solar time which was > quite different in the examples above. In 1600 the international > convention on time zones was nonexistant. Now this is something, the time > zones, with zero at greenwhich for longitude 0. Do you know that the > french considered the meridian of Paris as being the reference 0 till not > so long ago, a lot of Michelin maps quite renowed, are all wrong on the > meridians lines, & as such misleading for any one who wants to determine > his position on the world. I bought a GPS & my position is lat 50°42m 1s & > long. -4° 33m 46s. So I decided to construct sundials, I use the program > shadows which you can download for free on www.cadrans-solaires.org & > since then I constructed 3 dials, 1 horizontal & 2 polar (english on this > site is possible). Belgium has a very renowed sundial park which you can > visit in english on www.biol.rug.nl/maes/genk/welcome.html & shows one of > the 3 in the world digital sundials, i.e. a dial where instead of standing > in front of it, you have to go behind it and read the time in digits. Now > my question, it is about the equation of time, which in many countries & > the usa to, shows a graph going upwards in january, but the british use a > mirror graph, i.e. going downwards in january. I wonder why, what is the > reasoning behind it, I know they do all things different from us, but > saying a sundial is fast or slow compared to it is beyond my > comprehension, I mean the course of the earth around the sun is practilly > a constant & as such a reference. I am very much interested in your > comments on this subject & now stop talking which I do to much once on the > subject of clocks & sundials. P.S. I have nothing against the British! > Hear from you soon, Walter. >
