pragmatic historian time

Timekeeping with Fingers and Sun

When I was a kid, someone taught me a nifty little timekeeping technique involving my fingers and the sun. If you hold your fingers between the setting sun and the horizon, you can estimate the time for full sunset by counting 15 minutes for each of your fingers between the sun and the horizon line. For the photo above, there are 4 fingers between the sun and horizon, so there is about an hour before…

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