May 17, 2006
The Angle of the Sun
Well, someone finally built the daylight application I had always wanted to build. (Not as pretty of course, and upside-down.) You can put in any latitude, longitude, and time of day and get the exact angle of the sun. And it graphically shows the sunrise and sunset times for every day of the year.
So I plugged in the coordinates (30°18'01" N 97°44'50" W) and the dates for the summer and winter solstice to get all the extreme angles of the sun in Austin, Texas.
First is the altitude. This is the angle off of the horizon. 90 degrees is straight up. We're pretty far south, so on the summer solstice the sun gets up to 80.1 degrees.
The second is the azimuth which is the position on the horizon that the sun is directly above. It is measured in degrees off of North. So South is 180 degrees.
The diagrams below all show summer solstice in red and winter solstice in blue.
The first two diagrams just show the angles of the sun at sunrise, sunset and high noon on the two solstices. The next one down on the left shows a profile of our house and the shadow cast at noon on each of those days.
The three diagram on the right show a silhouette top view of our house and the angle of shadows at sunrise, noon and sunset. The gray four sided outline is our oddly shaped lot.
The big surprise for me is how little sun our south wall gets in the summer. I wish I had had an application that did this for me while we were designing the house. We might have made some adjustments to take advantage of the shade a little more.
Posted by David at 05:36 PM | Comments (6)
May 10, 2006
The Prize Winner
At the foot of the tub was a shelf, about 12-18in deep, that sat just above the edge of the tub itself. It was ever-so-slightly angled to drain into the tub. It was the most marvelous thing. It made shaving my legs less treacherous, it was a place to sit when I wasn't feeling well, and when I felt like giving myself a personal spa day it was a perfect spot for oils and soaps and a cup of tea.
It was a stroke of luck when we ended up with just enough room in the master bath to design in The Shelf. No one knew what I was talking about; the draftsman and our contractor both thought I was on crack and advised against it.
Lo and behold, watching The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio the other night (a veritable sea of eye candy for those of us with a strong mid-century fetish), there was the shelf. David grabbed the camera and got a quick still.
This one appears to be a solid sheet of marble or possibly formica. I'll settle for either.
Too bad I couldn't find a pink, porcelain garden tub. *sigh*
Posted by Christiane at 12:32 PM | Comments (4)