A Campbell-Stokes sunlight recorder at Nelson Airport processed Instagram styles.
What is a Campbell-Stokes sunlight recorder you ask?
Well, it’s sometimes called a “Stokes sphere”, was invented by John Francis Campbell in 1853 and modified in 1879 by Sir George Gabriel Stokes. The original design by Campbell consisted of a glass sphere set into a wooden bowl with the sun burning a trace on the bowl. Stokes’s refinement was to make the housing out of metal and to have a card holder set behind the sphere.
The unit hasn’t changed much and is still in use today, recording the hours of bright sunshine which will burn a hole through the card (thank you Wikipedia).
These photos taken by Rob Edwards of Lifeform Digital are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License and may reproduced for non-commercial purposes as long as attribution is given. If you’d like to use any of these photos commercially or without the watermark please get in touch.
