Today in the Letters page comments in the Times

Sundial in Lockdown

George Oliver is right to draw attention to the learning opportunities of sundials. The analemma is a diagram showing the position of the Sun in the sky, as seen from a fixed location at the same mean solar time, as that position varies over the course of a year. On Earth the track is a distorted figure of eight. On the planet Mars it’s ovoid, possibly better described as a tear-drop.

Bill Nye, in the TedEx talk on YouTube entitled: Sending a sundial to Mars does a great job explaining how in 2004 NASA(at his exhorting) altered a piece of its space equipment, the photometric calibration target, to make a sundial. But better still he got kids to send in their own paper versions so they would better understand their place in the Universe. Maybe one of our esteemed professors could organise such a pot of educational gold as follow-up to the multicolour rainbow pictures that grace kids windows and celebrate the return to school by maybe decorating school playgrounds with such.