Noon by your clock. The marked body is the Sun, and the line from the horizon up through the point overhead is your meridian. The Sun is probably not on it. A clock keeps its zone's time, shared across a whole country; the Sun crosses your meridian when it is ready.
This is local mean noon: noon for your own longitude, four minutes later for each degree west, with zones and summer time taken out. The Sun is near the meridian now — but only near. Next: where it stands at this hour every day for a year.
One mean noon a day, 24 hours apart, for a year. The clock never moves, only the date. The Sun stays near the meridian, but it climbs, sinks and sways, and the line it leaves is the analemma.
Its height is the season. The figure is 47° tall: twice 23.44°, the tilt of the Earth's axis. The top is the June solstice, the bottom December's, and the middle, where it crosses the celestial equator, is the equinoxes. From London that is 62° at the top and 15° at the bottom.
Its width is the equation of time. The Sun is up to 16 minutes early at mean noon in early November and 14 late in mid-February, and on the meridian only four days a year. But the figure folds the year in half: nothing on it says which lobe is which month.
Unroll it. Each noon keeps its distance from the meridian and gets a row of its own, and the figure-8 opens into a curve: the equation of time, how far the Sun runs ahead of the clock or behind it, day by day. Touch the curve to read any date.
It is two waves added together. The orbit is an ellipse, fastest in early January, which puts the Sun ahead and then behind once a year. The tilt turns its steady pace along its path into an uneven one eastward, twice a year.
Pinned to the stars instead, the last month of Suns is no figure-8: it is a line, the ecliptic. Step by the stars' day, 23 h 56 min, and the stars hold still while the Sun walks it, a degree a day. The analemma is that walk seen from a clock that keeps the Sun's average pace.