Hi Fred, If you print a copy of the picture, you can see that the style does at least pass through the line 6 - 18 and 12 - 24, so that is OK. I can't check the angles from the photo, but Tokushima is about 34 North, and the gnomon angle could be that (to the horizontal). As a fairly low-latitude dial (by UK standards anyway!) the range of hour angles will not be as wide as I am used to, but they do look to be narrower at noon and wider at dusk, as they should. I agree the designer may have had more interest in creating a fun sculpture than primarily a dial, but he could nevertheless have got the gnomonics right.
Regards, John ----- Original Message ----- From: "Fred Sawyer" <[email protected]> To: "Sundial List" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 2:28 PM Subject: Interesting sundial in Japan Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems to me that this dial is getting more attention than it deserves. It looks to me to be one of those very expensive 'sculptures' made by an artist who really does not understand how a dial works. This dial is not made right - it will not indicate the correct time - the relationship between the plane of hour lines and the gnomon is all wrong. The markings don't appear to me to be braille-like. They are simply 3 pips on the hour and 2 pips every 10 minutes. The fact that some of the pips aren't visible is probably just a trick of lighting in this particular photo. As I said - unless I've missed something here - this is a 'dial' I would pass by without paying it any heed. Fred On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 12:29 PM, J. Tallman <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello All, > > Here is a dial in Japan that I thought some of you may find interesting: > > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sundial_bunkanomori_tokushima.jpg > > I have seen it a couple times in the past month while casually browsing > for > sundial pictures, but I have never been able to find a good description > for > it. Does anyone know about this dial? I would be interested in what some > of > you think is really going on here, since this is a pretty unique > configuration. > > > Best, > > Jim Tallman > www.artisanindustrials.com > [email protected] > > --------------------------------------------------- > https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial > > > --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
