Article of the month February

Azimuthal Sundial

Software by Fabio Sabian

The SundialAtlas link points to a site that has as its main objective the documentation of sundials in Europe.
In addition, this site offers several computer programs for drawing sundials.
To use these, a free registration is needed.

One of the programs outputs a complete azimuthal sundial, ready to print.
This on-line calculator is reached with the link SolarCompass. A screen appears, like the one below showing particulars for Utrecht.
Latitude, longitude and time zone may be entered in the upper right fields marked with an asterisk, and saved.

Other data may be entered to the left.
This example is for the entire year, with January on the outside, the date scale in steps of 10 days, and the time scale for the entire day and divided in 15-minutes increments.
The three icons on the left select the azimuth scale size. The example uses maximum size.

A few seconds after a click on the draw (pdf) button the calculated sundial appears.
Save the pdf for later printing.