Fig. 1. A row of 17th-century houses along the bank of the Rakdam canal in the immediate vicinity of Amsterdam Central Railway Station.Fig. 2. A row of Delft Blue miniature houses, filled with Dutch gin (KLM gifts) along the edge of a horizontal sundial, right next to the Diemerbrug tram stop.Fig. 3. Sundial elements: wooden disc (d = 30 cm), forex disc (thickness 3 mm) with printed gnomon scale (d = 26.5 cm) and conical prochrome gnomon 25 mm high.Fig. 5. On the back there are explanations of what and how the shadow shows, and how the sundial should be oriented. A table with the moments of local solar noon for each day during the summer and a graph of the accuracy of the sundial have also been added. Fig. 6. Left: The shadow on our sundial shows Central European Standard Time (CET) at its end with an accuracy that is calculated to be equal to the value of equation of time; in addition to the standard dates, the shadow at its end shows the birthdays of the hosts who received the sundial as a gift. Right: A wall sundial from the 17th century on the New Church (Nieuwe Kerk) of Amsterdam whose shadow shows the apparent solar time (local time of Amsterdam) with its direction. Until 1890, all clocks in Amsterdam were aligned according to it.
Geographically, the territory of the Netherlands belongs to the UTC 0 time zone and should be aligned according to Western European time. Considering that it belongs to continental Europe, for practical reasons, the Netherlands “moved” to the next zone after the Second World War and is aligned according to the Central European Time (CET = UTC+1). Daylight saving time (DST) was introduced by the Netherlands in 1916. (with a break from 1945 to 1976).Fig. 7. Zappa, guardian of the shadow
