A kind of Calendar

Sometimes it is argued that living in a city alienates people from nature, and that, for example, the conscious experience of the course of seasons gets lost. There may be snow on the streets on a few mornings, or the colour of the leaves on the trees changes from green to red, but otherwise, it's just the length of daylight and the average temperature that distiguishes summer from winter.

However, if you keep your eyes open, city landscapes with skyscrapers and big buildings offer quite unexpected, archaic means to follow the course of the seasons, and allow even to establish some primitive forms of calendars.

For example, a few years ago, I was quite fascinated to discover that in the weeks around the summer solstice, the late evening Sun casts the distinctive shadow of a tall hotel building in my neighbourhood onto one of the bank towers in downtown Frankfurt, just before setting behind the Taunus crest. Another bank building erected a few years ago, which now blocks the afternoon Sun from our apartment, serves as a giant screen for the shadow of the same hotel tower just at sunrise around the equinox.

And about four weeks after the fall equinox and before the vernal equinox, I can witness kind of a solar eclipse in the late morning from the kitchen window: For a few minutes, the Sun disappears behind the pyramidal tip of the Messeturm:

At 9:58 in the morning,

the Sun disappears behind

the tip of the Messeturm.

Eight minutes later, at 10:06,

it reappears again, the eclipse is over.

On Sunday, October 14, the Sun's arc was still so high that its disk just touched the very tip of the tower. I couldn't make any observations over the week, and this Saturday, when the photos were taken, the path of the Sun crossed already behind the base of the pyramid. I usually try to observe this "event" each fall and spring, and now I know, we are around October 20.

Maybe you have similar solar calendars in your city?