Old Map, New Eclipse - Here I overlayed an old map of my quarter with the path of the TSE 2001 which passed over the southern areas of Africa. In the late nineteenth century not even the street in which I live today was build, so I marked the location of my flat with a red dot. The blue dot highlights the position of Hamburg's "Zeitball". Timeball was not a game, but a larger and well visible ball hanging on a semaphore mast and dropped precisely at a certain time of the day to help synchronize naval chronometers.

http://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/spag/ign/hh/ast/zeitball.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_ball