What is "noon" to a Charisan?

In another post I realized that the Safeholdian notion of "noon" cannot be ours. Due to Langhorne's Watch comp time, "Church" noon will always be 16.5 minutes before solar noon. (Neglecting the equation of time here.)

Among other things, analog timepieces become terribly difficult to imagine--Langhorne may like that effect. But more, even sundials become difficult to construct so as to make sense and sandglasses/waterclocks/etc. need something to be calibrated against.

What is the image, even, of noon to a Safeholdian? And by extension, what is an "hour"? Is it a 24th part of a day minus 2%?

jgnfld wrote:What is the image, even, of noon to a Safeholdian? And by extension, what is an "hour"? Is it a 24th part of a day minus 2%?

I've just assumed that Langhorne's Watch meant earth-normal hours minutes and seconds. If the Archangels adjusted time intervals at all, they should have done away with Langhorne's Watch and divided the diurnal cycle evenly.

As for "Noon" I've always treated it as "the sun's zenith," just as I would IRL.

I think you're making a flawed assumption that Langhorne's Watch begins at celestial midnight. It would make more sense if it was centered on celestial midnight so that celestial "Noon" would align with "Church Noon."

That makes sense and I probably should have thought of that. It still makes constructing sundials difficult as the required hour angle will be ~14.68 degrees. An angle of 15 degrees is easy to construct with a compass and straight edge. 14.68 not so easy.

So how do we measure these shorter "Church" hours in the first place to calibrate our sandglasses/waterclocks to even know when Langhorne's watch begins? If you are going to have a Langhorne's Watch, you need to have some way of measuring 31 minutes or about half a degree during the day or night independent of season and latitude. And what about the equation of time? Ignore it and have Langhorne's watch vary??!!

Plus, constructing an equal hour sundial is no mean task (unless Hastings provided plans) and so how can they measure to know when Langhorne's watch generally even is? Are all sandglasses calibrated only on the solstices? Did Hastings publish the dates of those 2 winter days when 15 degrees actually is one "Church" hour? Did Hastings provide more general tables of corrections from seasonal hours to equal hours? or for day length by season by latitude?

Weird Harold wrote:

jgnfld wrote:What is the image, even, of noon to a Safeholdian? And by extension, what is an "hour"? Is it a 24th part of a day minus 2%?

I've just assumed that Langhorne's Watch meant earth-normal hours minutes and seconds. If the Archangels adjusted time intervals at all, they should have done away with Langhorne's Watch and divided the diurnal cycle evenly.

As for "Noon" I've always treated it as "the sun's zenith," just as I would IRL.

I think you're making a flawed assumption that Langhorne's Watch begins at celestial midnight. It would make more sense if it was centered on celestial midnight so that celestial "Noon" would align with "Church Noon."

Sundials are not that accurate. One might also propose that they are accurate enough, so that clock noon is zenith noon, and many hours later the sun is not in the sky and the position of the stars in their crystal sphere changes every day anyhow.

=2014-04-25=
I believe on Safehold, mid-day is simply 13 o'clock.

R
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jgnfld wrote:In another post I realized that the Safeholdian notion of "noon" cannot be ours. Due to Langhorne's Watch comp time, "Church" noon will always be 16.5 minutes before solar noon. (Neglecting the equation of time here.)

Among other things, analog timepieces become terribly difficult to imagine--Langhorne may like that effect. But more, even sundials become difficult to construct so as to make sense and sandglasses/waterclocks/etc. need something to be calibrated against.

What is the image, even, of noon to a Safeholdian? And by extension, what is an "hour"? Is it a 24th part of a day minus 2%?

phillies wrote:Sundials are not that accurate. One might also propose that they are accurate enough, so that clock noon is zenith noon, and many hours later the sun is not in the sky and the position of the stars in their crystal sphere changes every day anyhow.

Sundials can get down to a minute or so. But in any case, the point I am trying to make is how do we know when the heck Langhorne's watch is?

According to "A Note on Safeholdian Timekeeping" at the end of OAR, Safehold's day is 26 Earth hours and 31 Earth minutes long. The Safeholdian day is divided into twenty-six 60-minute hours, and one 31-minute period, known as "Langhorne's Watch," which is used to adjust the local day into something which can be evenly divided into standard minutes and hours.

Noon may just mean (for Safeholdians) the zenith of the Sun.

Now here's a question. Has David Weber ever mentioned anything like 10 am or 2 pm in the Safehold books?

My guess is that the Terran Federation may started the "hour" count at "midnight" and may have use military time convention.

That is where we say "1 pm", the military time is 13:00.

So Safehold may number the hours from 1:00 to 26:00 followed by "Langhorne's Watch".

Weird Harold wrote:

jgnfld wrote:What is the image, even, of noon to a Safeholdian? And by extension, what is an "hour"? Is it a 24th part of a day minus 2%?

I've just assumed that Langhorne's Watch meant earth-normal hours minutes and seconds. If the Archangels adjusted time intervals at all, they should have done away with Langhorne's Watch and divided the diurnal cycle evenly.

As for "Noon" I've always treated it as "the sun's zenith," just as I would IRL.

I think you're making a flawed assumption that Langhorne's Watch begins at celestial midnight. It would make more sense if it was centered on celestial midnight so that celestial "Noon" would align with "Church Noon."

The Safeholdian day begins with the first second of the first minute after Langhorne's Watch, which would be 00:00:01. Noon is 13:00:00 (for clock purposes), and most (not all) Safeholdian civilians start again with "1 in the afternoon" following that and end with midnight (or "13 at night") at 26:00:00. Langhorne's Watch isn't actually part of the day at all, as far as Safeholding timekeeping conventions are concerned, and as Weird Harold suggests, it is centered on celestial midnight so that celestial noon occurs when the sun is highest overhead, regardless of when "13 o'clock" happens to fall.

The Charisian military (and, increasingly, other militaries) use the equivalent of 24-hour timekeeping and count the first hour after noon as 14:00:00 and, as our own military, would call that "fourteen hundred hours." The civilians who use that timekeeping convention (which includes Charisians; one reason it was easy for their military to adopt it) would refer to that as "fourteen o'clock" or simply "fourteen" rather than "fourteen hundred hours".

As for how the Safeholdians build accurate chronometers, they do it by combining and cross-connecting two of them in a single case. One counts the hours and minutes of the official day and stops each day at the instant Langhorne’s Watch begins; the second counts the minutes of Langhorne’s Watch and displays them on an inset face. At the end of Langhorne’s Watch, the second chronometer stops and the first one resumes at 00:00:01. Trust me, it took them a long time to come up with a way that worked, and the . . . complexity of the challenge is one reason watchmakers have always earned a lot of money on Safehold. It’s also one of the reasons Howsmyn’s chief instrument maker was so good at his job.


Does that help?

runsforcelery wrote:As for how the Safeholdians build accurate chronometers, they do it by combining and cross-connecting two of them in a single case. One counts the hours and minutes of the official day and stops each day at the instant Langhorne’s Watch begins; the second counts the minutes of Langhorne’s Watch and displays them on an inset face. At the end of Langhorne’s Watch, the second chronometer stops and the first one resumes at 00:00:01. Trust me, it took them a long time to come up with a way that worked, and the . . . complexity of the challenge is one reason watchmakers have always earned a lot of money on Safehold. It’s also one of the reasons Howsmyn’s chief instrument maker was so good at his job.

That... is a very complicated way of doing it, but at the same time, I can see the logic.
Since Langhorne's Watch offsets the day length, it would be impossible to incorporate as part of the 13-hour clock-face unless you were willing to split Langhorne's Watch, which the Holy Writ no doubt forbids.
Must make pocket watches a right copperplated %*"^ to build.

I must ask about digital displays. I have seen clocks that are clockwork-powered but which display the time in digital format (in this style). Offhand, I cannot see any reason why such a display could not be set up to run off the Safehold-style clock, giving it two displays, the large one for normal time and a small one for Langhorne's Watch.

And it wouldn't even come close to breaking the Proscriptions...

Thank you.

runsforcelery wrote:The Safeholdian day begins with the first second of the first minute after Langhorne's Watch, which would be 00:00:01. Noon is 13:00:00 (for clock purposes), and most (not all) Safeholdian civilians start again with "1 in the afternoon" following that and end with midnight (or "13 at night") at 26:00:00. Langhorne's Watch isn't actually part of the day at all, as far as Safeholding timekeeping conventions are concerned, and as Weird Harold suggests, it is centered on celestial midnight so that celestial noon occurs when the sun is highest overhead, regardless of when "13 o'clock" happens to fall.

The Charisian military (and, increasingly, other militaries) use the equivalent of 24-hour timekeeping and count the first hour after noon as 14:00:00 and, as our own military, would call that "fourteen hundred hours." The civilians who use that timekeeping convention (which includes Charisians; one reason it was easy for their military to adopt it) would refer to that as "fourteen o'clock" or simply "fourteen" rather than "fourteen hundred hours".

As for how the Safeholdians build accurate chronometers, they do it by combining and cross-connecting two of them in a single case. One counts the hours and minutes of the official day and stops each day at the instant Langhorne’s Watch begins; the second counts the minutes of Langhorne’s Watch and displays them on an inset face. At the end of Langhorne’s Watch, the second chronometer stops and the first one resumes at 00:00:01. Trust me, it took them a long time to come up with a way that worked, and the . . . complexity of the challenge is one reason watchmakers have always earned a lot of money on Safehold. It’s also one of the reasons Howsmyn’s chief instrument maker was so good at his job.


Does that help?