Railwaystation Amersfoort, The Netherlands
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In Amersfoort, a city in The Netherlands, in front of the railway station, the first public "Zonnewijzer" is placed. To understand this you need to learn some Dutch at first. In our language a sundial is named "Zonnewijzer". As such we are lucky to have a number of beautiful sundials in our country. But the word Zonnewijzer also may be split into two words, "Zon" and "Wijzer". Zon = SunWijzer = Pointer Doing this "Zonnewijzer" also could mean "sun pointer" (this isn't usual, just for this story). |
| This Zonnewijzer is mechanically driven. A
computer controlled arrow always points to the sun, during the day and the
night - in all kinds of weather, cloudy or clear.
In the arrow are 2 digital displays, one for civil time and one for local suntime. Thus, people can read the difference between "artificial time" and "natural time". The longitude correctionfor Amersfoort is 38.53 minutes (west of the time meridian). The EoT on the day the picture was taken (21 jan. 2000) was about -11 minutes (dial is slow) The total correction then is 50 minutes. |
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The digital display in the picture reads : civil time 12:15, suntime 11:25, which corresponds to the calculated correction. |
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Below is a larger picture of the pointer.The EoT on the day the picture was taken (12 March 2000) was about -9.7 minutes (dial is slow). The total correction then is 48.2 minutes, rouded to 48 minutes. The digital display in the picture reads : civil time 11:50, suntime 11:02, which corresponds to the calculated correction.  |