Photos of Jaipur, November 2001.
Jantar Mantar is an old observatory. Though built in the early 1700s,
it was not a telescopic observatory. Nevertheless, the instruments
were quite spiffy.
LWL and then I on one of the big sundials.
Observing the Sun and the Moon. Shadow projected onto these
hemispherical bowls, on which were marked coordinates, the zodiac,
reference lines. There are 2 bowls, one the complement of the
other -- the observer would pick which one was the appropriate
one for the phenomenon at hand and climb down.
This plane is tilted at just the right angle so that on
summer solstice the gnomon would cast an infinitely long shadow
(we guessed).
Giant hanging astrolabe.
Panorama of the facility.
Looking down onto the dial of an instrument that measures
altitude at transit.
Monkeys live on the facility.
The dial section and triangular gnomon
of the 22-m tall sundial. The mother
of all sundials. Gets the time to within a few seconds.
Bit of a scary, vertigo-inducing climb here.
The view from the top of this megasundial. The smaller
sundials below are for measurements of the longitude of
zodiacal constellations.
Identifying marker for one of the zodiac sundials. RA and Dec too!
LWL and LAS take a break from all the science.
Yet another mesauring device. This was a cylinder with wedges
cut out. The gnomon and shadow are visible.