I'm going to level with you: this is going to be a fairly disappointing video.
Because when I found out there's a sundial that works 24 hours a day, I thought, I'll
go there, I'll film it. And then...
But when the skies are clear, this sundial can work 24 hours a day. Or at least, it can
for more than three months of the year. Because this sundial is in Longyearbyen, in Svalbard,
in the Arctic Circle, and this should be the midnight sun.
It is the summer equinox today, as I record this, and we are so far north that even now,
close to midnight, hence the whispering, the sun is up in the sky. It'll be there for another
couple of months, rising and falling but never dipping below the horizon. And importantly,
it will never be high in the sky either: this part of the Earth is never pointed anywhere
even close to the sun, so the sun always appears low and close to the horizon. For that same
reason, the gnomon - the bit here that casts the shadow - is steep, steeper than any other
sundial in the world.
And there's a really clever bit of design here that only makes sense on a sundial like
this. Most sundials have a gap at noon: you have to account for the thickness of the gnomon,
so in the morning you read from one side of the shadow, and in the afternoon you read
from the other. It jumps over that gap in the middle.
But this sundial works at midnight, so at some point, it has to switch back. So here,
it overlaps. There's a little overlap. You could also solve that problem with an incredibly
thin gnomon, but then it might not stand up to the four months of constant arctic night,
when it won't work at all.
It's 1am. We are half way home, on the mile walk back to our hotel.
And the sun's come out.
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