Finally, the SunRing Shadow Casters are being upgraded! The new ones are made from 1/4" thick stainless steel. I designed them in Adobe Illustrator, exported their definitions as .dxf files and had them laser cut by SendCutSend.com. I will be installing the Winter Solstice Circular Shadow Casters in the coming days and calibrating them for alignment. Due to their precise nature, calibration should be much easier!

Today I began the installtion of the new Winter Solstice Circular Shadow Casters. The previous shadow casters were not precisely placed apart along the winter solstice line made of bricks. While my long term goal is to use stainless steel for the solstice line, I'm switching to wood for now, cut to exacting lengths to control the spacing of the shadow casters. The prior shadow caster supports were placed to one side of the brick solstice line with hardware enabling the circles to be roughly centered over the solstice line. The new shadow casters are being placed directly within the solstice line.

Today I finished the first pass of the installation of the Winter Solstice Circular Shadow Casters. The two bigger ones went in a lot faster as I was digging into the softer "fill" portion of the SunRing. I did my best to align the shadow casters along the mostly completed wooden winter solstice line. Tomorrow is predicted to be sunny, and I'll see how well the alignment turns out. Since we are just 4 days from solstice, the circular shadows cast by the shadow casters should be very nearly concentric.

We had a very clear sunrise, but the results were super disappointing! The shadows were skewed well to the left! Since the shadow casters were fairly well centered over the solstice direction line I concluded that the direction line itself was off. The system apparently worked in the previous years because the shadow casters leaned over the direction line and had been adjusted to line up without full respect to the direction line. So... I figured how much the direction line had to be rotated around the center of the SunRing and went through the rather laborious process of doing it. The weather forecast for tomorrow is for a clear sunrise, hopefully the shadows will be perfect!

Another good sunrise and again the results were disappointing! The shadows were now skewed to the right! Only 2 days to winter solstice. With time running out I kept the rotated soltice direction line in place and moved the shadow casters to where I hoped would be very close to their correct positions. As I was finishing up, fog rolled in north of the SunRing and curved around toward the southeast and more fog came in straight from the west, south of the SunRing filling in to the east. By evening super thick fog was in place and the forecast does not call for early clearing tomorrow.

Today is the last day to prepare for the sosltice and we are socked in with very thick fog. No way will it clear before sunrise. It didn't. I did review the alignment and made a few tweaks. The forecast for tomorrow calls for "patchy morning fog".

We invited a few neighbors for the solstice sunrise and even though there was fog and clouds, they came anyway! No sunrise today but a good time was had by all. Tomorrow we may get a chance, and since the sun "hangs" for a few days before reversing towards Summer, I hope to see the status of the shadows.

The morning sky before sunrise was mostly cloudy with high clouds, but a crevas to the east gave hope that the sun would appear at least long enough to see the shadows.

At sunrise, the sun was weak, but in just a few minutes, strengthened. The shadows were almost perfectly aligned! Success!