Shadow Shot Sunday – Analemmatic Sundials

The other day I was poking around the parking lot of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum on a special type geocache called an Adventure Lab. As part of completing the Adventure Lab I came up on this thing.

Analemmatic Sundial

What? A Human Analemmatic Sundial. Analemmatic sounds like some sort of embarrassing medical condition.

My best bud Mr. Google tells me that an analemmatic sundial is special sundial where the hours are arranged in an ellipse and hour pointer is vertical. A human analemmatic sundial is where you are the pointer. Also you have to stand on a different spot every month for it to work.

Rest assured I was not up and out of the house by 8:30. The other part of this special sundial is that you have to correct for daylight savings time yourself. I thought it was pretty cool.

It was not the first time I have ever seen a sundial like this. Tulsa’s Turkey Mountain Urban Wilderness Area has one but it is labeled as a Human Sundial. Human is a lot easier for me to spell than Analemmatic.

It has been there eight years, just off the lower parking lot and still works.

It was an Eagle Scout project. God bless Eagle Scouts I say. They keep the world going around.

Anyway, I learned something. You probably knew all about it.

I’m linking with Shadow Shot Sunday

6 thoughts on “Shadow Shot Sunday – Analemmatic Sundials

  1. Alana

    We have one of these at a children’s garden that’s part of a children’s play museum called the Discovery Center where I live. LOL, can you imagine having to move all the tiles for Daylight Saving Time and then move them back in the fall? It’s almost as funny as the internet meme of people moving the stones at Stonehenge. I’ve checked out the one we have locally and it really works. And the sun is shining today! Road trip? I just never knew the official name and I think I’ll keep it as Human Sundial.

  2. Lisa

    Well, you got me here, before I even read the post I was looking up the definition of analemmatic! I don’t think I’ve seen a shadow quite that tall before.

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