Experiment Report for the Eratosthenes Project on http://youth.net/
School Name: Richford Jr-Sr High School (2)
School Location: Richford, Vermont, USA
Email Address: dmacdonald_at_richfordk12.net
Experimenter: Doug Mac Donald
Latitude 44.9945 N
Longitude: 72.6705 W
Distance to Equator: 5000.3738
Measured shadow angle in degrees: 45.047
Calculated Earth circumference: 39961
Comments:
For our location, we used 5 GPS units among 17 students and took the mean of the latitude and longitude values. All students took two measurements of a meter stick's shadow at 12:21 PM EST (solar noon was 11:58 AM) on March 20. They took the mean of the shadow lengths and used an inverse trig equation to calculate a shadow angle. We took the mean of all 17 shadow angles and used that as the class shadow angle. Using 111.133 km per latitude degree, we calculated our distance to the equator. Then we used a proportion to calculate C.
Received on Fri Mar 27 2009 - 13:17:07 PDT