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Shadows is a program used to design sundials and astrolabes. It can be used by everybody without any required technical skills. Shadows will calculate everything and print the drawing according the user's preferences. Shadows is used by thousands of users around the world.

Shadows offers a choice among a lot of different types of sundials:

Plane sundials with polar style (the most classical) for any orientation and reclination
Analemmatic sundials
Cylindrical sundials (Armillary ring, shepherd's dial)
Bifilar sundials (also known as Mitchnik sundials)
Each type is described precisely and can be configured step by step using the Sundial creation Wizard.

You can start with a simple type of sundial (direct south for example) and progressively discover more technical types later.

Vertical due South sundial calculated and drawn by Shadows. The user can add text and images and customise the drawing options. The position of the style is marked with points A (gnomon) and B (polar style).

Once designed on screen, your sundial will be printed to scale on one or several pages depending on its size. Then you just need to reproduce the drawing on the final material. You can also print a template to cut the style, and print the coordinate list to use with a protractor and a ruler.

The sundials created with Shadows are totally customiseable for your location and the wall declination. The program comes with a database which contains more than 2500 cities over the world, each with its latitude, longitude and time zone. Obviously, you can enter new records in the database, especially using the Google Earth or the Google Maps interface.

You can create sundials for any place on Earth, even in the southern hemisphere. Shadows offers you to create a genuine and accurate sundial you certainly will enjoy more than any ready-made sundial you can find in a garden shop.