The Hudson-Dawe Dial
| Here is the first example developed in a Hypermedia environment of an image with movable parts from an early modern book on navigation. The graphics for this image--it was called a demonstration of a Declination Instrument--were done by Janice Hudson, an English Honours student at Acadia University, using Macromedia's Fireworks. The animation was encoded by Trevor Dawe, a Computing Science major at Acadia, using Macromedia's Flash. | |
| By moving the cursor over either of the tabs in the image, you will be able to rotate the Solar or the Lunar volvelle in either direction. Notice, as you do so, the increasing or decreasing presence of a black circle inside the circle from the tab labelled "Luna." This represents the phases of the moon. In the majority of surviving copies of the text from which this image was re-created, this circle was not cut out of the Lunar volvelle. From this, we can conclude that the majority of readers of surviving texts neither made use of nor fully understood the representation of the Declination Instrument. | |