How To Calibrate A Sun Dial

First thing you will want to also make sure of when purchasing or building a sun dial is this. Ensure the leading edge of the pointer has been placed between the 6am and 6pm markings on the sun dial. This is the only way your dial will be able to come close to telling accurate time. There are a lot more factors when calibrating your sun dial, this guide will fill you in on what you need you need to know. This way you will be able to set-up and calibrate your own sun dials.

Depending on where you live you will be living in different time zones from me, to try and find noon on the dial, find what latitude your time zone is in. For every seven degrees east or west you are you need to add/subtract four minutes to your sun dial. Once you have done these two steps you should have a sun dial that can tell the time pretty accurately. There are more factors to make-up for the irregularities you will notice when checking the time on the dials. It will be impossible to get your dials to be perfectly accurate. Even the biggest sun dial is still off by a fraction of a second. You can indeed have it telling time within minutes of the correct time though, pending you have an impeccable set-up and calibration.

With the factors involved in calibrating your sun dial it can be very difficult trying to do this. You need all your measurements to be exact, you will need to know how to tell longitude and latitude. This I think is what the hardest part of getting an accurate time is, it’s fairly hard to do this if you don’t have any experience with it. It may be easier to buy a digital sun dial which has been already calibrated by a professional, it will also come with instructions and a manual for your use. This is a lot easier and will give a lot more accurate time, if you feel you have the knowledge to take on calibrating your own then by all means go for it. I think calibrating it yourself will bring a lot more joy in having a sun dial. After all what is the point in having a sun dial that is just digitalized like everything else we see in today’s world. There are a ton of pictures you can look at online for finding out how your sun dials should look. You will also find lots of manuals and instructions for building your own sun dial.