In between running a kingdom, founding a city, and commanding an imperial army, Jai Singh II managed to keep himself busy with astrological pursuits - overseeing the construction of five observatories scattered across northern India, of which the largest is in Jaipur. Visiting, you walk amongst fantastically big and odd-looking instruments designed to monitor the movements of the sun and the stars. We had a guide to explain the function of each of the (impressively sophisticated) devices, but I'm not sure I can remember everything he told us.
The concave structure above is actually half an instrument, separated to allow the court astronomers to walk in amongst its sections for better observation. Observation of what, I don't know.
I do know that the tower below is the world's largest sundial:
It's so precise that you can actually see the sun moving across it, counting the seconds. The actual dial part is a much larger version of the one pictured here (which served as a prototype):
Here's me with a smaller sundail calibrated to track the progress of the astrological period for Leo - my sign:
Finally, this wasn't actually in the observatory, but we thought this was a particularly well-dressed cow:
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment