Thermometer

First attempt

Second attempt

Third attempt

 A bit more than a year ago, I noticed at reference 1 the elderly thermometer in our garage roof reading 94°F.

So a few days ago, when the heat in the early afternoon was fairly horrific, I tried again, with the best I could do first time around, despite trying to tell Cortana where to focus, being the first of the three snaps above. My first excuse is that it was earlier in the afternoon than the year before, so brighter. My second is that maybe I should have used the raking shot of the year before; like an archaeologist trying to extract worn letters off a slab of old stone. But I did not think of that until today.

For my second attempt I lodged an envelope behind the thermometer and Cortana and this did the trick; click to enlarge and all is revealed. Third attempt even more legible, although at the expense of losing the left hand end of the thermometer.

Concerned that it appeared to be exactly the same temperature as last year, I put the thermometer in the refrigerator overnight, after which it recorded about 50°F, while Cortana says it should be a little below 40°F. But it is quite an old refrigerator too, so all I can safely claim is that the thermometer does move and it was probably of the order of 90°F in the roof of the garage the other day.

PS: Bing now says that the proper way to measure the temperature of a refrigerator is to put the thermometer into a glass of water, with the bulb well covered, and then to put both thermometer and glass into the refrigerator overnight. But I did not know about the glass at the time and even if I had, I am not sure that immersing an old wooden thermometer in water was a very good plan. In any event, I couldn't be bothered to repeat the experiment.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/weather-station.html.