I don’t know what this guy was looking at, but it wasn’t the shadow of the tip of the Shard. In the five days since the last similar shot, the gap had moved slightly south and west, according to the conveniently-placed rows of dots on the road.
This was the photo that closed the loop, the last shot taken before the Sun got back to where it was in the sky when I started.
I knew roughly where these shadows would fall, but it still amused me actually going to find them. To slot this final one into place, with the map revealing both the inevitability of the analemma and the shonkiness of my cartography, gave me a rare feeling of joy at a project seen through. A feeling that was clearly premature, as I let the blog sit idle once the city and the world reopened, and didn’t finish the photo blog, the map or the description.
The upcoming eclipse has got everyone here thinking about celestial mechanics, and you can’t say that about many things. It got me thinking about this again, and it’s a good time to close the loop.
In the months after taking this photo, I continued to head down to the shadow to fill in some of the yawning gaps in my analemma, closing it despite its inevitability. These photos remain to be added to the map and the blog. There’s another eclipse in Europe in August next year. Maybe that will motivate me.
Shard Analemma 