Experiment Report for the Eratosthenes Project on http://youth.net/
School Name: Richford Jr-Sr High School (1)
School Location: Richford, Vermont, USA
Email Address: dmacdonald_at_richfordk12.net
Experimenter: Doug Mac Donald
Latitude 44.9949
Longitude: 72.6688
Distance to Equator: 5000.4182
Measured shadow angle in degrees: 44.732
Calculated Earth circumference: 40243
Comments:
We used one student's meter stick shadow measurement taken at 12:21 PM EST (solar noon was 11:58 AM) and had all 7 students create a scale drawing on Geometer's Sketchpad to find the shadow angle. We took the mean of these angle measurements obtained from a scale drawing to calculate the class shadow angle. 7 students took GPS latitude and longitude readings and we took the mean of them for the class latitude and longitude. 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 - 13:28:50 PDT