Q&A for How to Tell Time Without a Clock

It depends on whether it’s day or night. If it’s nighttime, use the north star tracking method. The compass will help orient you to the north so you can find the Big Dipper. For telling time in the day, you’ll need to line the compass up with a sun clock, which you can print out online. The way you use it will depend on where you are in the world, since you’ll need to line the clock up with geographic north.

You’ll need a fixed point from which to measure moving shadows, like a nail in the middle of a board. Go out every hour throughout the day and mark the position of the shadow. Then you can use your marks to help you tell time! You’ll have to do this multiple times throughout the year, since the position of the sun throughout the day shifts over the year.

Try using the Big Dipper technique. Or, you can use a moondial, which works similarly to a sundial. A basic moondial is only accurate on the night of a full moon, so you’ll need a correction table to adjust for the time difference during other moon phases.

You could just count the days yourself, and use things such as the sun's position in the sky and the amount of time it is visible as a guide.

No. You see, the position of the moon during moonrise changes every day throughout the month. So the shadows formed will be completely different. If you want a moondial, you will have to create 29 different for each stage of the moon (excluding the new moon).

It may be a mistake.

You are correct. The above article is confusing on this point. The moon rises an hour after sunset only when it is nearly a full moon in the waning gibbous stage.

Hold your hands out as far from your face as you can go. It does not matter how big your hands are, because your arm length will even it out.

You might be holding your hand at different lengths from your face, or you might live somewhere where the sun doesn’t move perfectly overhead this time of year (e.g., Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, Russia, etc.).

As they teach you in school, they divide the 24 into 12 for AM and PM, or it could even been for it to fit on the clock. Yet, you can use 24 hour time, or, ''army time''. Now think of this, the short hand is for the hour, and an hour is a short word, just like the hour hand. But the long hand stands for minute, because minute is a long word like the minute hand. If the minute hand is on one, that would be 5 minutes in the hour. But say it's on two, that would be 10 minutes into the hour. If it's on 3, then that's 15. Do you get the pattern? Now if the hour hand is on three and the minute hand is on 4, it would be 3:20.

You can use the moon to tell time by dividing the sky into quarters and noting the moon's position in the sky. Find the middle of the sky, and then divide these 2 halves in half to divide the sky into quarters going from east to west.