Talk:Sundial

@ClemRutter: do you have an RS for sundials being unusable because of herds of reindeer? You'd only have to wait for the obscuring reindeer to move, as they do, to be able to read the time. Contrast the situation with a nearby pride of lions, where you would not safely be able to stay around long enough to get a reliable reading of the time.

During ancient times and the middle ages, people were often more interested in diving the time between sunrise and sunset into 12 hours, than they were in dividing the whole day-night period into 24 equal hours (such uniform-length hours were often mainly of interest to astronomers). This article doesn't even discuss the different definitions of "hour", as far as I can see... AnonMoos (talk) 22:05, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

You will need to explain why an article about sundials needs a definition about Hours, it most certainly could do with a link to Hour and History of timekeeping devices. The obvious placement to me would be in the Apparent motion of the Sun section. Edmund Patrick – confer 06:39, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Because sundials have been around a long time, and many ordinary people in ancient times and the middle ages were often more interested in dividing the interval between sunrise and sunset into hours, rather than in abstract uniform hours (i.e. 1/24 of a full day-night period). Therefore I assume that there probably should be some types of sundials which track the sunrise-to-sunset interval. That was the question that I came to this article to find the answer to, and I was a little surprised to see that it completely avoided the whole issue... AnonMoos (talk) 09:08, 14 April 2018

I know that there are already enough pictures so I won't add this one, but in case anyone wanted a picture of the Greenwich (England) sundial, it is here:

Gah4 (talk) 22:44, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Is a horological divise that tells the time of day when the direct position of the sun in the sky — Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.188.243.152 (talk) 16:37, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

@Edmund Patrick re: this edit and your revert: See Wikipedia:Short description, in particular:

• "A short description is not intended as a definition".
• "Short descriptions exceeding 40 characters may be truncated in some contexts."
• "When used in searches, they are scanned quickly and in this case a longer and more detailed description can be less useful."

The existing short description, at 80 characters, is far too long. The point of a short description is to "complement and clarify the page title" not to define the article's subject. In this case for instance "Sundial" might be parsed as an adjective ending in "–ial" rather than the compound "sun-dial". My proposed short description adequately disambiguates the title while remaining short enough to avoid truncation. rblv (talk) 18:53, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

@Rublov well that was a long read but useful, thanks. Edmund Patrick – confer 08:04, 22 February 2026 (UTC)