Date: September 13, 2010
Contact: Carol Connelly, Director, Media & Communication Services, ext. 5267, cconnelly@pnc.edu

 

Dr. Aaron Warren, PNC assistant professor of Physics, helps install the sundial located in the mid-campus quad, adjacent to Schwarz Hall.

PNC Receives Sundial from the North American Sundial Society

Westville – Purdue University North Central students, faculty, staff and guests will now have the opportunity to check the day's time by consulting the new sundial on campus.

The sundial is now located in the mid-campus quad, directly adjacent to Schwarz Hall. It has been placed on a pedestal that allows the sundial to give accurate readings and so that a passersby may easily check the dial.

The dial was designed and presented to PNC by Dr. John Davis, of Flowton Dials, in the United Kingdom, as a direct result of his being awarded the 2009 Sawyer Dialing Prize by the North American Sundial Society (NASS). It has become a tradition for the prize money to be used to support the commissioning of a public sundial. PNC was selected for this honor by the NASS President, Frederick W. Sawyer III in consultation with Dr. Aaron Warren, PNC assistant professor of Physics.

Warren describes this to be a “double-horizontal sundial.” It is so-named because it combines two forms of dial, one being the standard horizontal garden sundial, the other indicating the position of the sun relative to the stars.

The PNC dial is in the shape of an unconventional nine-sided polygon, in recognition of 2009, the year the sundial was awarded the Sawyer Dialing Prize. The dial is made of marine brass construction.

Warren noted this was custom designed for the PNC latitude and longitude, so it may tell local solar time very precisely. “It will be more accurate than most people's watches,” he said.

There are instructions on a plaque on how to read solar time and convert it to clock time. It is capable of telling the time, the position of the sun in the sky, the position of the sun along the ecliptic - the annual path of the sun relative to the stars in the sky and the time of sunrise and sunset of any day in the year.

Warren explained that this type of dial was invented in the 1600's by Rev. William Oughtred. For more than a century one of the final tests for an apprentice sundialist, particularly in England, was to design a double-horizontal dial, as it was then considered state-of-the-art.

The motto engraved on the dial is "I mark my hours by shadow; Mayest thou mark thine by sunshine" from Carol Brevoort Hilton-Turvey. Another motto in classical Greek, distributed in the corners of the dial, is spelled Zeta-Eta-Theta-Iota and is the imperative "Live!" and is the motto of the Sawyer Dialing Prize.