Sundial Park Arkaroola Village, South Australia, Australia
By Shifter Brains on 18-Jul-10. Waypoint GA2462

Tell time the old fashioned way.

People have been using the sun to tell the time for many thousands of years. The simplest time piece is a shadow stick. The ancient Egyptians built tall stone towers called obelisks. Everybody could tell the time by looking at the obelisk's shadow. Obelisks were sometimes called "Cleopatra's Needles".

A sundial is a device that measures time by the position of the Sun. In common designs such as the horizontal sundial, the sun casts a shadow from its style (also called its Gnomon, a thin rod or a sharp, straight edge) onto a flat surface marked with lines indicating the hours of the day. As the sun moves across the sky, the shadow-edge progressively aligns with different hour-lines on the plate. Such designs rely on the style being aligned with the axis of the Earth's rotation. Hence, if such a sundial is to tell the correct time, the style must point towards true north (not the north or south magnetic pole) and the style's angle with horizontal must equal the sundial's geographical latitude.

There is a fair degree of precision to construct a sundial that tells the time accurately.

At Arkaroola Village , there are at least four various sundials in the area, some appeared to be more accurate than others.

Take a photo of yourself and your GPS with one of the sundials and post it with your log, please include the time displayed on the sudial and the actual time in your log.