Shepherd dial
A shepherd's dial (also known as a pillar dial or cylinder) is a type of sundial that measures the height of the sun via the so-called umbra versa. Its design needs to incorporate a fixed latitude, but it is small and portable. It is named after Pyrenean shepherds, who would trace such a sundial on their staffs.
Shepherd dial
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History
This type of sundial was very popular in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. • Illustration — A typical shepherd's staff, with a gnomon that produces a shadow on a scale of months.
Since the ancient Roman era, people have created sundials which tell the time by measuring differences in the sun's height above the horizon over the course of the day – Vitruvius describes them as viatoria pensilia. The earliest description of a shepherd's dial as known today was written by Hermann of Reichenau, an 11th-century Benedictine monk, who called it a cylindrus horarius. It was also known in the Middle Ages as a chilinder oxoniensis (Oxford cylinder). Such sundials did not need aligning north-south and so became very popular, appearing in Renaissance artworks such as Holbein's 1528 Portrait of Nicolaus Kratzer and his 1533 The Ambassadors.
Variants
Variants
A Slovenian shepherd's dial is a flat dial in the shape of a sector of a circle. It is hung vertically and measures the altitude of the sun. A movable peg adjusts for the changing seasons.
Exhibit in the Putnam Gallery - Harvard University - Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
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The biographical narrative on this page is based on the Wikipedia article Shepherd's dial, revision 1370826496 (EN edition), by its contributors. VALÉORINE has edited that text and built its own documentary record around it. The reused material is available under CC BY-SA 4.0, and this page's reuse of it is offered under the same licence. Everything else on this page — the chronology, the holdings, the evidence, the plates and the connections — is VALÉORINE's own record. Sources and licences.
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Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Kren, Claudia. The Traveler's Dial in the Late Middle Ages: The Chilinder. Society for the History of Technology. 18. 3. 419–435. July 1977.
- 2.De Solla Price, Derek. Portable sundials in the antiquity. Centaurus. 14. 242–266. 1969.
- 3.Mills, Allan A. Altitude sundials for seasonal and equal hours. Annals of Science. 53. 1. 75–85. 1996. 10.1080/00033799600200121.
- 4.Stebbins, F. A. The Astronomical Instruments in Holbein's "Ambassadors". Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. 56. 45. 1962.
- 5.Webzine Sloveniana.
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