What’s all this about then?

I’m writing this on 21st June 2021, the summer solstice in London. A year ago, 21st June 2020 in the middle of a freakish lockdown, I started chasing the shadow of the tip of the Shard. I’d planned to start on the spring equinox in March but hey, everyone had plans in March.

I heard once that if you find the Sun in the sky at the same time of day each day for a year, it makes a figure of eight. It’s at the top of the 8 in the summer, at the bottom in the winter and wide both sides twice a year. The 8 shape is called an Analemma.

A few brave souls have set up a camera for a year and actually taken multiple exposures to show it on their local patch of sky. There are a couple of examples here. Apparently it was first photographed in 1978-79 by Dennis de Cicco, and he got an asteroid named after him a few years later. Course these days when everyone has a camera and maps and augmented reality night sky apps it doesn’t seem quite such a big deal. But still, I looked and no-one had done it with the shadow of the tip of the Shard, or any building I could find.

So, a project: take a photo each day for a year of the shadow of the tip, or of the Sun through the tip of the building. Tag the location of the photos on a map and I should get a complementary analemma – not of many Suns in the sky but an analemma of tags on the map across part of the City I hardly knew. I’m not going to get an asteroid for that, but I’d hoped it would at least get my locked down arse out of the flat a bit more often.

Maybe not as often as I’d hoped though, as July 2020 proved grey and rainy. I knew I should have started in March.