From: cooperp@issaquah.wednet.edu
Date: Wed Sep 24 2003 - 09:09:21 PDT
Experiment Report for the Eratosthenes Project on http://youth.net/ School Name: Skyline High School School Location: Sammamish, Washington Email Address: cooperp@issaquah.wednet.edu Experimenter: Phil Cooper Latitude 47.36.013 Longitude: 122.01.763 Distance to Equator: 5,272,124M Measured shadow angle in degrees: 47.778 Calculated Earth circumference: 39,724.5645KM Comments: Very good experiment. For this experiment, I introduced an 8mm error. The error came form the fact that a meter stick is 8mm thick. I had students mount two meter sticks at 90 degrees. I had them use a right triangle taped to the meter sticks to get their 90 degrees. One meter stick was mounted sitting on the other which ment the hight was 1.008 meters vs 1.0 meters. The 8mm error caused a distance change of around 190,000 meters. They were impressed to find such a small difference caused such a large difference in the circumference. It drove home the point the accuracy in measurement is quite important. Thanks for the experiment Phil Cooper