Experiment Report for the Eratosthenes Project on http://youth.net/
School Name: Richford Jr-Sr High School
School Location: Richford, Vermont, USA
Email Address: dmacdonald_at_richfordk12.net
Experimenter: Doug Mac Donald
Latitude 44.9944 degrees N
Longitude: 72.6706 degrees W
Distance to Equator: 5000.368 km
Measured shadow angle in degrees: 44.8924
Calculated Earth circumference: 40099 km
Comments:
Shadow measurements of a vertical meter stick were taken at 12:43:15 PM EDT on 9/23/2010. This was shortly after solar noon on the day after the equinox (because of overcast conditions on the date of the equinox). Twelve trigonometry students took the mean of 4 shadow measurements, and then used inverse tangent to calculate the shadow angle. We used 111.133 km per latitude degree to determine our distance to the equator. We used handheld GPS units to determine the latitude and longitude of the spot where the shadows were measured.
Received on Tue Sep 28 2010 - 10:11:39 PDT