I’d been away a bit, amazing after that spring and summer. On top of that, the end of August and start of September saw foul weather. So this was the first clear chance in a while. The sky was ridiculously blue and the shadow pleasingly sharp, but that’s not going to help locate it accurately from a long bridge.
I really should have done some cunning triangulation on this, but at this stage I hadn’t. The shadow was north of Hays Wharf and east of London Bridge, but there’s a big margin for error on the flat brown of the river. The shot I thought might help nail it was this one:
The tip of the shadow lines up with HMS Belfast lining up with the exact centre of Tower Bridge. Where that line intersects the east side of London Bridge is where I took it from. It’s very roughly twice as far out as London Bridge City Pier, so there the tag on the map goes.
I noticed an odd effect this time. When you’re on the south side looking north, the shadow seems to stretch nearly all the way to the northern bank. From the north side looking south, the shadow is a shrunken nub barely a pier-width from the south bank. I’ll put this down to some sort of perspective thing, but it shows it’s not easy to estimate the location from wherever you are.
Shard Analemma 