Cylindrical sundials

The shepherd's dial is a cylinder with a rotating hat on top, equiped with a perpendicular style. The dial is held vertical by a ring or a cord, and the hat shall be rotated to the mark of the day. Then the dial is oriented so that the style points towards the Sun (while the dial stays vertically). The shadow casted by the style will fall on a curve that tell the solar hour. Time is therefore given by the Sun's altitude.

The program Shadows allows you to print the layout of hour curves and date lines. You just need then to fold the paper around a cylinder and add a rotating hat and a style.

 Page in the online help of Shadows on the shepherd's dial

The armillary ring is in fact the equatorial band of an armillary sphere. The style of this sundial is made by the pole axis of the sphere. This axis cast a shadow on the equatorial band which is scaled in hour angle, with 15° per hour. Several parallel line can be drawn to scale the Sun's declination. Each hour line can also be replaced by an analemma curve (8-shape) to provide mean time instead of solar time.

This sundial is built inside a semi-cylinder which axis is parallel to the pole axis (i.e. a polar sundial). The shadow is casted by one of its edges, for example the right edge during the morning, and the left edge during the afternoon.

This dial is drawn outside a vertical cylinder. The style is installed perpendicular to the surface, and oriented towards any azimuth. This dial can be installed for example on a cylindrical tower.

 Page of the online help of Shadows on the vertical cylindrical sundial