{"id":6011,"date":"2012-02-02T10:00:03","date_gmt":"2012-02-02T10:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2012\/02\/02\/thursday-eratosthenes-blogging\/"},"modified":"2012-02-02T10:00:03","modified_gmt":"2012-02-02T10:00:03","slug":"thursday-eratosthenes-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2012\/02\/02\/thursday-eratosthenes-blogging\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday Eratosthenes Blogging: Measuring Latitude and Longitude with a Sundial"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I keep saying in various posts, I&#8217;m teaching a class on timekeeping this term, which has included discussion of really primitive timekeeping devices like sundials, as well as a discussion of the importance of timekeeping for navigation. To give students an idea of how this works, I arranged an experimental demonstration, coordinated with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wiredscience\/dotphysics\/\">Rhett at Dot Physics<\/a>. We&#8217;ve been trying to do this literally for months, but the weather wouldn&#8217;t cooperate. Until this past weekend, when we finally managed to make measurements that allow us to do some cutting-edge science. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Eratosthenes\">For 200 BC, anyway<\/a>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>So, what did we do? Well, we each made a sundial, and shot time-lapse video of it using a webcam. Here&#8217;s mine&#8211; note the Lego gnomon, graciously donated to science by SteelyKid (whose attempts to help with &#8220;Daddy&#8217;s &#8216;spermint&#8221; weren&#8217;t enough to earn a co-author credit, but do rate this acknowledgement):<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Kc-7CIshqco\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The too-bright first few frames are because I forgot to adjust the exposure initially, and the greying out at the end is because some thick clouds rolled in. This was shot in our back yard in Niskayuna, and simultaneously (in some frame of reference, anyway), Rhett was taking video of his own sundial, in Hammond, LA. I took both videos, and ran them through Tracker video to measure the position of the end of the shadow for each frame, and produced the following results:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/467\/files\/2012\/04\/i-f65f5db1973db0a6d7e32c7e430dc677-sm_shadow_lengths.JPG\" alt=\"i-f65f5db1973db0a6d7e32c7e430dc677-sm_shadow_lengths.JPG\" \/><\/p>\n<p>You can see that both datasets show the expected behavior: the total length of the shadow: the shadow starts out long, and gets shorter, reaching its minimum length at noon. After solar noon, the shadow gets longer again.<\/p>\n<p>I took these datasets and fit a parabola to each (not for any really sound theoretical reason, but because it was easy to do a parabolic fit in Excel, my demo version of SigmaPlot having expired). Using the fit values to find the minimum gave the time of solar noon as 12:10 for me, and 12:19 for Rhett.<\/p>\n<p>I found the minimum length by averaging nine points near the minimum time from the fit (the exact point predicted as the minimum, and four frame to either side), and compared to the length of the gnomon to find the latitude. My Lego stack was 20.5 cm high, with a minimum shadow length of 37.6 cm; Rhett&#8217;s gnomon was a nail with a height of 6.2 cm and a minimum shadow length of 7.2 cm.<\/p>\n<p>The ratio of shadow length to gnomon length gives the tangent of the latitude, which come out to 61.4 and 49.3 degrees for my data and Rhett&#8217;s, respectively. This is the latitude relative to the point on the Earth where the Sun is directly overhead at noon, though, and needs to be corrected to get the real latitude. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tecepe.com.br\/scripts\/AlmanacPagesISAPI.isa\/pages?date=01%2F29%2F2012\">online nautical almanac<\/a> gives the declination for the Sun on that date as approximately 18 degrees south of the equator. Using this correction, the latitudes determined from the measurements come out to 43.4 and 31.3 degrees, in reasonably good agreement with the known values (from Google Maps) of 42.8 and 30.5 degrees.<\/p>\n<p>Finding longitude is, famously, more difficult, and relies on knowing the time of noon at your location compared to the time of noon at a reference location, conventionally chosen to be Greenwich, England. Looking up the time of noon at Greenwich on Jan. 29th, 2012 gives a time of 12:13 GMT. My measurement of 5:10 GMT (12:10 EST) is thus four hours and fifty-seven minutes off, giving a longitude of 74.3 degrees west. Rhett&#8217;s one time zone west of me, so his data give a noon time of 6:19 GMT (12:19 CST), corresponding to a longitude of 91.5 degrees west. Again, these values are in reasonably good agreement with the accepted values of 73.9 and 90.5 degrees west, respectively.<\/p>\n<p>The resulting positions aren&#8217;t too bad. Using SunCalc, because it was easy to see how to put in latitude and longitude points, you can see that the data put <a href=\"http:\/\/suncalc.net\/#\/43.4,-74.25,10\/2012.01.29\/18:12\">my position<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/suncalc.net\/#\/31.3,-91.5,9\/2012.01.29\/18:12\">Rhett&#8217;s<\/a> somewhat north and west of our actual locations. The position difference is around 45 miles in my case, and 85 in Rhett&#8217;s. So, it&#8217;s not exactly GPS levels of precision, but then, I didn&#8217;t work all that hard to get these measurements. A little more care would undoubtedly get closer to the mark.<\/p>\n<p>So, we&#8217;ve accomplished a couple of things, here. First, with some household items and cheap webcams, we have conclusively demonstrated that the Earth is round, after the method of Eratosthenes. And we&#8217;ve also shown that with some simple tools and appropriate references, you can locate yourself on the surface of the Earth with pretty good accuracy.<\/p>\n<p>There are some obvious ways to do a better job of this, but this was plenty good enough as a proof-of-principle for my class. And that&#8217;s as much as I need for a blog post, too&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I keep saying in various posts, I&#8217;m teaching a class on timekeeping this term, which has included discussion of really primitive timekeeping devices like sundials, as well as a discussion of the importance of timekeeping for navigation. To give students an idea of how this works, I arranged an experimental demonstration, coordinated with Rhett&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2012\/02\/02\/thursday-eratosthenes-blogging\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Thursday Eratosthenes Blogging: Measuring Latitude and Longitude with a Sundial<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,134,663,80,7,11,56,136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-course_reports","category-everyday","category-history_of_science","category-physics","category-science","category-technology","category-video","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}