Hi Frank: It's interesting that you mentioned the UTC+4 Time Zone as being shunned. Coincidentally, just last week I heard that President Medevev (sp?) of Russia last year reduced the number of Time Zones in Russia from twelve to nine. He is now proposing that Russia observe Daylight Saving Time all year!
-----Original Message----- From: Frank King [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2011 5:04 AM To: John Carmichael Cc: 'Frank King'; [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: Re: part 2 of longitude correction Dear John, That is a fascinating map... http://www.travel.com.hk/region/timezone.htm It bears out many of my prejudices and gripes!! Alaska seems to be a whole time-zone wrong and John Pickard's eloquent contribution draws attention to the curious way that Australia is carved up. One particular curiosity is that the time zone for UTC+4 seems to be actively shunned. Maybe this is because 4 is an unlucky number in some cultures :-) To be fair, the Mercator's projection is slightly exaggerating my conjecture. Once you are in the Arctic, time zones are a bit academic. I very much take your point... > If your sundial is located far from its > Prime Meridian in one of these crazy Time > Zones...then designing it with built-in > longitude correction is a must. Yes. Agreed. You also say... > ...at worst, a longitude corrected dial will > only be about 16 minutes off (because of the > Equation of Time). On the average, it is > only off by about seven minutes... Hmmm. I cannot resist pondering that assertion! I feel a separate message coming on... All the best Frank --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
