Congratulations! Your quadrant-sundial generator works OK, and it yields
quite an elegant drawing in postscript.
This one is an enhanced version of an old kind of altitude sundial.
There are lots of variations, but maybe one of the most beautiful is the
one built in AD 1568 by Giarolamo della Volpaia. You can see it in the
History of Sciences Museum in Fiorenze (Italy): it uses italic and
babilonical hours because they're more evenly spaced. This
venerable kind of sundials also includes the Capuchin, Clog or Saint
Rigaud sundial, the Regiomontanus sundial and many more. You can see
the same idea in H. Sonderegger's page:
http://webland.lion.cc/vorarlberg/280000/sonne.htm
As regards to using simple lines (circle arcs or straight lines) as date
lines, there are very elegant ideas on this topic but there remains
always this double-sided problem:
a) For certain latitudes (or wall declinations or times of the day)
the hour lines get jammed and it is difficult to tell the difference
between them.
b) Sometimes it is very difficult to interpolate the lines because
there are great and/or highly variable intervals between two consecutive
curves.
Apart from the Oughtred sundial, I do not know about any of this kind of
sundials not having these two drawbacks.
But maybe some other members do.
Thanks again,
Anselmo Perez Serrada
41.73 N 4.63 W
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