Gerrit Sasbrink found in his neighbourhood a number of armillary spheres that look somewhat peculiar, and should be classified as ‘undials’, not sundials.
An armillary sphere has an hour ring in the equatorial plane, and a pole style at right angles to it.
In the first example, the style is in the plane of the hour ring. The style shadow will never read time this way.
In the second example, the hour ring is vertical.
While this is quite correct for a location on the equator, this specimen is in fact located on a latitude of 53 degrees north.
The third specimen looks impressive, with a lovely hour scale and a fine pedestal.
The style appears to be square to the equatorial plane, and the inclination of the equatorial plane seems to be in order.
The XII is in the lowest point of the hour scale, indicating readout in local apparent time.
The hour points are distributed evenly, as it behoves an armillary sphere.
It is just that there are so many hour points. We count 23 of them already, and the circle is not full yet.
We have here a natural day of more than 24 hours, a feat hitherto unheard of in the field of gnomonics.
Now the French Revolution, for example, saw the introduction of a division of the natural day into ten hours.
A new time system, with some thirty-odd hours to the natural day, would therefore be quite possible, but we doubt whether this was the intention here..
