imagigami Sun Dial 1982

Made in the Shade

A Site Specific Sun Dial Installation
San Francisco, California 1982-1986

A south-west facing view of San Francisco, with the Pacific Ocean at the far horizon. The site of the Sun Dial is indicated near the south-east corner of Golden Gate Park.

In San Francisco at the south-eastern corner of Golden Gate Park you will find the quiet Inner Sunset neighborhood.
This low-impact community of traditional three-flats and small apartment buildings draws out a dozen blocks to the west in the shadow of Mt. Parnassus and the University of California Medical Center.
Irving Street is the principle commercial strip and at the corner of 9th Avenue the "N" street car turns south before streaming to the beach on Judah.

Hugo Street, site of 'Made In The Shade', stretches six blocks westward from Arguello Street to Seventh Avenue. It parallels Lincoln Avenue, the southern border of Golden Gate Park.
For a baker's dozen of years from 1977 through 1990, I called this tidy neighborhood home and lived in a converted attic on Hugo Street, between 3rd and 4th.
The roof was pitched and a sky light had been added facing more or less west. Absent fog or overcast each afternoon, a brilliant sunbeam would stream through the skylight, cross the floor and climb the opposite wall.

226-A Hugo Street, San Francisco 94122
(37.7655 North Latitude, 122.4605 West Longitude)

As the sun sets down in the western ocean, the beam of light moves upward toward the ceiling. As the sunset migrates from north to south as the seasons change, the beam of light likewise oscillates from south to north.

An oblique view of the Sun Dial location on Hugo Street. The red arrow indicates the general direction of incoming sun from the west during the afternoon. In the far background the Veterans hospital at Ft. Miley is visible behind the trees of Golden Golden Gate Park.

Made In The Shade
The Inner Sunset Sun Dial

It took only a guitar pick, pasted in the center of the plexiglass sky light, to cast a shadow on the west-facing wall sufficient to track the setting sun with precision.

The beam of afternoon sunlight approaches the target wall.

This series of daily readings (all at 4:00 P.M.) illustrates the movement of the shadow from day to day during the spring (and the fall) when daily variance is the greatest. By the time of the summer solstice the change from day to is miniscule. As July stretches into August and fall, the daily migration has reversed in direction and begun to increase.

The Leap Year effect is demonstrated for May 2nd. Individual minutes are tracked from 3:50 P.M. to 4:00 P.M. in two consecutive years, 1982-1983. The precession of 1/4 of a day is evident in the two parallel sun-tracks. Readings in 1986 were synonymous with 1982.

The Analemma demonstrated

"If you took a picture of the Sun at the same time each day, would it remain in the same position? The answer is no, and the shape traced out by the Sun over the course of a year is called an analemma. The Sun's apparent shift is caused by the Earth's motion around the Sun when combined with the tilt of the Earth's rotation axis. The Sun will appear at its highest point of the analemma during summer and at its lowest during winter.

Analemmas created from different Earth latitudes would appear at least slightly different, as well as analemmas created at a different time each day.

The analemma pictured below is built up of photographs of the sun taken with a fixed-position camera in Ukraine from August, 1998 through August, 1999. The foreground picture from the same location was taken during an early evening in July, 1999."

Thanks to N.A.S.A

British Sundial Society

i m a g i g a m i
None Genuine Without My Portrait
Founded in 1982 by Emanual Goldstein