Posted 3/21/2006 05:35:00 PM by Douglas

Here's the sundial at the Houston Museum of Natural History. Yeah, I know that March 21^st is no longer the day, but it was cloudy yesterday and I was busy. Anyhoo, here are some pictures. Here's the sundial. The angle of the granite? 29.75º, the same as the latitude of the museum.

That lady continued to give me dirty looks the whole time I was there. Apparently, a 30-something white guy hanging around a museum full of kids at lunch on Tuesday kinda seems odd. Maybe it does, in that I was the only person hanging around waiting for mean solar noon. The event was absolutely 100% Druid free. Mean Solar Noon, ironically, came at approximately 12:10, according to my watch. Here is the shiny orb that's at the zenith of the sundial.

It's got three sets of holes, which I've always assumed were to shine sunlight down on the ground during the four times a year when the sun and earth lined up perfectly in this magnificent cosmic ballet. Boy was I wrong. It looks like the orb isn't lined up with where the sun is at solar noon on March 21^st. Imagine my disappointment, as I was expecting some wondrous Indiana Jones-esque laser beam in the map room special effects to rain down from the heavens on this glorious day, but it didn't. I blame George Bush. Or global warming. Anyhoo, here's the shadow it makes on the granite on the ground. Note that it's at the same place in both March and September.

The funniest part of this whole adventure? Seconds before it hit solar noon, a 12 year old dorky looking kid walked up as I was standing right under the orb, and he was going to explain this whole contraption to the 20-something babysitter/au pair that he was uninterestingly dragging behind him. So he walks up, sees the shadow on "noon" and "March/September" and says, "ah yes, by looking at the shadow, you can see that it's almost. . . . . March. Or September. Whatever."

Brilliant.