What's This?

it's this

A really nice portable sundial, usable at any latitude.

equinoctile dial for maritime time... use

(less advanced unit)

It is very elegant and beautiful as well as functional.

Appears to be Chinese in origin.

Their technology was far ahead of Europeans at the time.

And they are now catching up quickly and in some areas,exceeding the rest of the world:Entangled pair communication wirelessly over extended distance.

I wonder what they are up to on the back side of the moon?

Perhaps testing their entangled pair communication through the moon's mass?

An ancient Chinese engineer even constructed an earthquake detector that would tell the direction of the earthquake by dropping a ball in to a dragon's mouth,with four dragons, each facing a cardinal direction.

Imagine the delicate balance of the ball on a pin-point!

I thought it had 8 directions?

They wanted to know which direction it was so they could send out there FEMA response?

You are right on both counts. The emperor wanted to know where to send help.

Here is an image of the device.

The dragons drop the balls into a frogs mouth.

It predates the modern seismograph by about 1700 years.

It did not balance a ball,it had a standing pendulum that dislodged the ball from a plate in the direction of movement.

Some depictions show a suspended pendulum.

That's interesting. The Chinese view a dragon as a symbol of prosperity and good luck.

The dragon symbol is also the sign used for Aliens or Sky Gods.

It's also their national symbol. Like the bald eagle in the US.

Of course,it could be an ancient lie detector,to see if the person was on the level.

The digital version is even better.

Way cool looking. I wonder what it would be worth at auction.

Galileo's astrolabe according to this

I like to look at things from the past as man kept on improving his precision engineering skills that initially mainly tied to astrology. However, it always culminated in the most valuable of all the time-measuring-device, commonly known as clock/watch, and how it evolved and gotten ever smaller, even as we speak...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwIcWj9VUqw

A Chinese timepiece designed and built by Master Waza Tym Rol X. Built in 1800BC (before chronographs) for approximating the day time. Unfortunately it could only be used in daylight hours. It was donated to the London Maritime museum where Mr. West Clox (Sept 22, 1885), managed to recreate and miniaturize the cumbersome time piece to a user friendly pocket time piece which could indicate time in the dark.

This was later refined to be wrist wearable and environmentally friendly. It was later renamed as a cell phone apple watch. Great alien advancement in time pieces.