The Friday File – Sundials tell all! Well, perhaps just the time………… ;-)

– photo courtesy of http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jmikeshaw/

What is it about sundials that conjures up feelings of mystery and intrigue.  I can only speculate it has something to do with their ancient dawning so many moons ago (oh yes, puns intended).

This above photo is the, “Man Enters the Cosmos” sundial sculpture created by Henry Moore and is located at (where else?) Sundial Plaza.  Mr. Moore created the sundial in 1980 to commemorate space exploration in the later part of the 20th century.

The framing of the background to our sundial is our utterly gorgeous Chicago skyline.  One on occasion, I counted eight separate wedding parties enjoying the perfectly placed backdrop for their wedding photos.

Let’s take another look at this spectacular sundial:

 – photo courtesy of http://cache2.asset-cache.net

A little FYI about the sculpture itself.  This thirteen-foot tall timepiece is made of bronze, and the style is referred to as a, “bowstring equatorial sundial”.  The name is borrowed from the display of the shadow-casting “timekeeper”, which looks similar to a bowstring.   The shadow of this line projects onto the dial face to indicate the time of day (weather permitting, of course).

Here is a lovely little explanation on how this process works:

“By making marks on the ground at even intervals around an object, one can tell time as the object’s shadow moves in correspondence to the angle of the sun. In Moore’s bronze sculpture, the markings that identify different time points are on the smaller, central crescent. The beam that crosses the large crescent is called a gnomon, or shadow caster. Based on the motion of the sun across the sky and its position against the horizon, the gnomon casts a shadow that falls upon the marks to indicate the time of day.” 

– http://www.artic.edu/aic/education/sciarttech/2b2.html

 Here is another angle of this time-teller:

– photo courtesy of portfoliographicdesign.com

So there you have it, folks.  An ancient tool the likes of which appears to stand the test of time!