There are apparently enough ways to make a shadow tell time that somebody needed an index covering thirty-nine different kinds of sundials.
Visit mySundial.ca’s Sundial Primer
Carl Sabanski’s Sundial Primer is a hand-built reference to gnomonics, the science of sundialling. The index runs through familiar horizontal and vertical dials and then keeps going: equatorial rings, analemmatic sundials, polar dials, cube dials, window dials, cylinder dials, diptychs, stained-glass dials, Foster-Lambert designs and stranger variants.
That is before the site gets to the geometry.
A clock made from astronomy
A useful sundial is more than a stick and some numbers.
The site explains latitude and longitude, longitude correction, wall declination, gnomon height, true north and south, refraction, the equation of time, solar altitude, azimuth and declination lines. It also includes construction aids, charts, templates and material for both northern and southern hemispheres.
The whole project has the unmistakable texture of specialist old-web education. There are homemade names for utilities such as the “Dialling Buddy,” “Correct-A-Dial,” “Wall Declinometer” and “SNOURTH-ometer.” It is technical material presented by somebody who clearly enjoys the fact that the subject can become ridiculous in a productive way.
The Primer advertises more than 1,400 charts and images in its extended material and paper kits for numerous sundial designs. That gives it value beyond historical curiosity. A teacher, hobbyist, garden designer or amateur astronomer can use the pages to move from the concept of solar time to a physical object.
Search engines can explain what a sundial is in one paragraph. mySundial.ca is what you find when the next question is, “Fine. How do I actually build the weird one?”
This site was found in CacheRat’s broader Ancient Web research corpus.
Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list
The web used to be very good at letting one person build an entire small university around a narrow obsession. This is one of those places.