Unitarian Universalists of Sterling

On November 11, we inaugurated a new feature of our worship space—an analemma.  An analemma is simply this: If you record the position of the sun in the sky at the same time every day you would notice that at certain times throughout the year the sun's position not only varies higher and lower (North and South) as you would expect with the change of the seasons, but also slightly East and West. This figure-8 path that the sun makes in the sky is called the analemma. You may be familiar with seeing this figure on sundials and globes

One of the distinctive architectural features of our sanctuary is our easternfacing clerestory windows, which bless us with streams of sunshine during our Sunday morning services.  The exact way that these beams and shadows move is a function of the orientation of our building, and the time of day.

The analemma on the wall of our sanctuary will be a focal point for an artistic and unique interior design with a wealth of symbolic meaning.  Not only will it tie us to the changing of the seasons, the shape of the analemma itself suggests the symbol for infinity, and yet it is a momentary phenomenon situating us in the Cosmos at a particular time and place.

Our analemma is created by a mirror, carefully placed in the southernmost clerestory window, that projects a spot of light onto the south wall.  We will simply make a mark on the wall at 10:17:30 EST every week or so for year. (This time was chosen since it is the nearest time to our Sunday morning worship service time for which sunlight is available through the clerestory windows all year long.) These marks are actually little hand-crafted copper suns. We have added seventeen marks as of  25 March, 2008.  We are about half way through now, and our analemma will be complete in November 2008.   This is the best guess as of now (25 March 2008):