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Lunchtime Photo

Published on 25 Comments on Lunchtime Photo

A couple of days after we got to City of Hope I headed over to San Marino to take pictures at the Huntington Library. This is a sundial near the front of the botanical gardens. It was, scandalously, half an hour off when I got closer to take a look at it.

April 24, 2023 — San Marino, California

25 thoughts on “Lunchtime Photo”

  1. Jerry O'Brien

    The other thing they say about sundials: What if it's cloudy? How you gonna tell the time with a sundial if it's cloudy? And at night? What are you gonna do, use a moondial?

    1. golack

      Go to England--sundials everywhere. It's just that they are optimistic--one day the Sun will shine and they'll finally know what time it is.

    3. Jerry O'Brien

      I was only kidding. I respect sundials. I consider all watches and clocks, electronic or mechanical, to be sadly inaccurate sundial emulators.

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  3. Steve_OH

    On 24 Apr, solar noon at City of Hope was at 12:50 pm, so the sundial should have been off by about 50 minutes.

    1. ssittig1

      Solar.noon is at 12 PST at 120 degree longitude. City of Hope is about 118 degrees longitude, so Sun is on the meridian 8 minutes earlier (Earth rotation is 15 deg/h, or 60 min/15 deg, so 4 deg/min.). And the 'sundial' is called an 'armilla' by astronomers. And we stupidly move our clocks up an hour, so local mean solar noon at CoH is about 12:52. Maybe 12:53.

  7. Bobber

    The earth's elliptical orbit results in solar noon shifting by half an hour throughout the year compared to mean solar time. So wait a few months and it should be accurate.

  8. mertensiana

    This reminds me of an incident from childhood. We'd learned about sundials in class so several of us decided to make one on the playground. We stuck a stick in the ground and calibrated it to the current hour. So far, so good.

    Then one pupil piped up and suggested we add a minute hand. I objected that this wouldn't work but the others insisted on adding one, adjusting it to the current approximate minute. So it worked for the moment, and I wasn't articulate enough to explain why it wouldn't keep on working.

  9. pjcamp1905

    Now you know why we don't use sundials anymore. That's pretty typical. Elliptical orbit + where are you in the time zone?

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