This book shows how to make an accurate sundial with just a bit of simple materials, geometry, and a map with information about your longitude and latitude. It also shows how a sundial is really a model of the relationship between the earth and the sun – and, by extension, between you and the cosmos.
A few experiments help to see what’s happening as if you were looking at the earth from outer space. Starting with a stick and its shadow on a sunny day, the books shows how to locate true north, how to feel the earth turning under your feet, and how to turn the stick into a small scale model of the axis on which the earth turns.
So your sundial not only tells you the time, it also tells a story about how you are related to the sun and the stars – “geometry,” after all, means “to measure the earth.” As you, the sun, and the earth all move in your related orbits, a sundial will not only tell you the time, it will remind you that you have a place in a much bigger picture.
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