What are gnomons?

A gnomon is like the part of a sundial that casts a shadow and helps tell time.

Imagine you have a big clock face on the ground outside, and there’s a stick or a small post in the middle. The sun moves across the sky during the day, and as it does, the shadow from this stick moves too, kind of like how the hands of a clock move. This moving shadow tells you what time it is! That stick or post is called a gnomon.

Think about a sundial as your friend who knows where the sun is. The gnomon is like its hand, pointing out the time by showing how long the shadow is and where it lands on the clock face.

Just like how you use a ruler to measure things, the gnomon helps measure time using the sun’s position in the sky. It doesn’t need batteries or buttons, just sunlight!

If you have a garden and put a tall stick in the middle of it, you can watch how its shadow moves from morning to evening. That’s like having your own gnomon working hard to tell time for you!