Dear John,
I really enjoyed your analysis distinguishing the
standpoints of British and U.S. diallists when it
comes to longitude-corrected dials. I need to
send two replies. Here is the first...
In the U.K. most of us are indeed fairly close,
in time, to the Greenwich Meridian. I am about
26 seconds of time to the east of longitude zero
but, even so, I know of a longitude-corrected dial
a few hundred yards from where I am sitting.
This is very well laid-out but the 12 noon line
looks like a mistake. It seems almost as though
something slipped when the line was being marked
out!
This must be true for any location whose longitude is
close to a multiple of 15 degrees. I have designed
dials for 14 deg 16' east and 15 deg 37' east (in
Sweden and Italy respectively) and in both cases I
thought these were too close to 15 degrees to use
longitude correction.
I then had a client in France in a place with an
unlikely name, Condom, (will this get through your
spam filter?) and I naively thought I would be
clear of both 0 degrees and 15 degrees but it
turned out to be at 0 deg 22' east which is too
close to home!
I despaired of ever having a client who didn't
live close to 0 deg E or 15 deg E and then I
received a request on behalf of Hermann Zapf
(yes, the Dingbats guy) and he lives about
8 deg 40' East. "At last", I thought, "I can
design a longitude-corrected sundial".
Unfortunately, this was not to be. He understands
sundials and he wanted local solar time!
He also wanted a macabre inscription:
Jeder Tag kann der letzte sein.
Each day can be the last. Maybe this is German
humour? Happily he is still with us aged 92.
All the best
Frank
Frank H. King
Cambridge, U.K.
---------------------------------------------------
https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
