Sundial installed near Sarai Kale Khan

  • last year
Yes, our city does come up with some hideous monstrosities that cost us perhaps a hundred times of what they are worth (so Indian government...) Our government's sense of aesthetics is awful! However, this sun dial was installed without any fanfare and unless we show this to you here, chances are that you're not even aware that it exists (considering that you probably paid 10 crores for it, from your taxes!)

This is located at the head of the Barapullah nullah elevated shortcut road that reaches AIIMS at INA market.

A sun dial is a device that tells the time of day by the position of the Sun. In common designs such as the horizontal sundial, the sun casts a shadow from its style onto a surface marked with lines indicating the hours of the day. The style is the time-telling edge of the gnomon, often a thin rod or a sharp, straight edge. As the sun moves across the sky, the shadow-edge aligns with different hour-lines. All sundials must be aligned with the axis of the Earth's rotation to tell the correct time. In most designs, the style must point towards true celestial north (not the north magnetic pole or south magnetic pole). That is, the style's horizontal angle must equal the sundial's geographical latitude.
It is common for inexpensive decorative sundials to have incorrect hour angles, and these cannot be adjusted to tell correct time.

The principles of sundials can be understood most easily from the Sun's apparent motion. Scientists have proven that the Earth rotates on its axis, and revolves in an elliptical orbit about the Sun; however, meticulous observations and experiments were needed. For the purposes of a sundial, an excellent approximation assumes that the Sun revolves around a stationary Earth on the celestial sphere, which rotates every 24 hours about its celestial axis. The celestial axis is the line connecting the celestial poles. Since the celestial axis is aligned with the axis about which the Earth rotates, the angle of the axis with the local horizontal is the local geographical latitude.

Source: Wikipedia

This footage is part of the professionally-shot broadcast stock footage archive of Wilderness Films India Ltd., the largest collection of HD imagery from South Asia. The Wilderness Films India collection comprises of tens of thousands of hours of high quality broadcast imagery, mostly shot on HDCAM 1080i High Definition, HDV and XDCAM. Write to us for licensing this footage on a broadcast format, for use in your production! We are happy to be commissioned to film for you or else provide you with broadcast crewing and production solutions across South Asia. We pride ourselves in bringing the best of India and South Asia to the world... Reach us at rupindang [at] gmail [dot] com and admin@wildfilmsindia.com.

Recommended