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Sundials
I’m interested in making sundials, and I’m a member of the British Sundial Society. I like to make one when I go on holiday. These are all made from stiff paper and all you need are the things you’d find in a school maths set.
Making a sundial? Use the Sundial Angle Calculator to calculate the angles for your hour lines.
This is a horizontal sundial made for Leno in Italy, on Lake Como. The 12 o’clock line is set off-centre to adjust for longitude. Leno is about 5 degrees west of the CET dateline, so noon by the clock is about 20 minutes before local ‘sun’ noon.
This dial is on the wall of a building in Leno near the lake. You can tell from the shadow that the date is close to the summer solstice (it was actually June 11th).
The sundial on the cathedral in Como town. The sun wasn’t very strong that day, but you can just about see the shadow falling on 12 noon, again in mid June.
This is a Capuchin Sundial made for Desenzano in Lake Garda, Italy. This type of sundial tells the time from the height of the sun in the sky (its altitude) which is different for every hour of every day.
The actual angle depends on your latitude, so it has to be made for a specific location.
To use it, you move the string along to the correct part of the calendar (this one is set to about 21st Feb) and then adjust the posoition of the bead so that it is on the ’12’ marker. Then you point the dial at the sun so that the sun shines through the little paper tab and lines up with the line at the top. The position of the bead as it dangles down tells you the hour.
It is a bit inaccurate, particularly around noon as the lines are so close together, but it does have the useful feature that if you hold it horizontal, the string dangling down vertically crosses the hour lines for sunrise and sunset that day. Also you don’t need to know where North is to use it.
An equatorial sundial made for Tideswell in the Peak District. The dial part with the hours on is in the same plane as the equator, and the angles between the hour lines are all 15ยฐ. This would work anywhere in the world if you adjusted the hours paper up or down to match the latitude of your location.
