Yesterday I visite the Johannes Kepler University in Linz for work and I did a short walk at the campus from the parking lot to the building the customer was situated. There I found this astronomical sundial by Johannes Kepler.
“Traditional sundials were the official timekeepers until 200 years ago, but they deviate from uniform ‘real’ time by up to 16 minutes. This difference arises from the tilt of the Earth’s axis and the Earth’s non-uniform motion around the sun. This motion, in turn, is governed by Kepler’s laws. My idea was to build a sundial that depicts these movements and derives the precise time from them,” explains Riegler. Besides the precise time display, an incredible number of details are incorporated: The clock features a star sphere that accurately reproduces the star catalog from Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables. It also displays a globe with the world map from the same work by Kepler.
