DAY 13

Children of the neighborhood attacked me today with a water-ballon ! They didn't hit me but that was very close. Thrown from three story high, i'm quite happy they didn't... It is sunday and the temperature is slowly going up, you can feel that spring is just around the corner.

After reading quite a lot about it, i though it was time to meet again with the Jantar Mantar. I found it in worse shape than two years ago but still impressive.  

The Samrat Yantra is the bigger sundial in the world after the one from Jaipur. It is a big stair (21m high) with two wings on the side. It is oriented north, so at night you should imagine the Polar Star just right on top of the last stair being fixed and all the other stars moving around it in circle counterclockwise.

It served different purpose but the main is telling what time it is. As you can see on the east wing (right side on the previous picture) the shadow hits on the lower part of the wing, so it is some time after midday (it was 14.00). The shadow hits the west wing from 6.00 AM to midday then the east wing from midday till 6.00 PM. Precision is 1 second. 

The Jai Prakash Yantra is used to measure the coordinates of the sun, the moon or other planets. It is a reversed view of the sky.

Two cross-wire are installed on top of the instrument and the shadow projected by their middle point indicates the position of the sun. On this picture it is quite faint but it is there on the white part more or less in the center of the picture. Sure you have to imagine that all this white parts where covered with lines and numbers to mark the position. They have been erased by the time, but we gonna see them in Jaipur where the instruments are in better condition of conservation. 

The Ram Yantra looks a little bit like a small version of the Coliseum in Roma. It is the most beautiful of the instruments. Access is not authorized as it was two years ago. It is certainly better for the conservation of it but not for taking pictures...

Once again, the shadow hits different parts of it where you can read the altitude and azimuth of the sun or the moon when she's very bright.

The Misra Yantra is five different instrument in one. It is a latter adjonction by the son of Jai Singh. The inner circle is supposed to tell when it is midday in Zürich... that's quite strange as the observatory in Zurich was built years after. The outer circle is supposed to do it for a small town in Japan that never had an observatory.. so this is even stranger. The other two (that you don't see on the picture) give the midday time for Greenwich and a place in Russia. Both had observatories at the time so that make sense. 

Both wings work as a smaller replica of the Samrat Yantra. Here on the east wing you can see the shadow hitting more or less the half of the white plaster which indicates that we are around 3.00 PM.

This place is still stunning and i can't help but think it looks a little bit like a skatepark...

In the metro that is ... everywhere else there is no problem at all. Here a lot of guys are chewing tobacco and the pollution can be quite hard on your lungs.