This is the Samrat Yantra, which means the Supreme Instrument. It stands 27 meters tall with its shadow moving visibly at 1mm per second making it the world’s largest sundial. Checking it against the clock on our phones, the time on this sundial is remarkably exact — and it’s so large that you can literally watch time moving across the curve of its plane.
The Samrat Yantra stands in Jaipur, India as part of the the Jantar Mantar which is an extraordinary collection of astronomical instruments built between 1727 and 1734 by Mahraha Jai Singh II, a young Indian king with a profound love of astronomy. The observatory consists of more than a dozen enormous geometric devices used for measuring time, predicting eclipses, tracking stars’ location as the earth orbits around the sun, figuring out the declinations of planets, and determining the altitudes of the stars.
The Jantar Mantar is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it was easily one of the most interesting scientific destinations on our whole trip so far.
And here I was thinking it was the world’s largest skate-park. 😉 Very cool discovery!
First place goes to Kate Cunningham from Sydney with her spot-on guess. Honorable mention goes to Colin Summers in Santa Monica who was circling the right answer with his “some kind of time keeper.”
You forgot to mention, that in addition to being a sun dial, it also functions as the world’s largest mouse trap!
Give a guy some credit here!!
xox, #1FANNY