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 44.99462 N
Longitude: 72.67099 W
Distance to Equator: 5000.99 km
Measured shadow angle in degrees: 45.20
Calculated Earth circumference: 39830.89 km
Comments:
Shadow measurements were taken of an upright meter stick at 12:24 PM EDT on March 20, 2012. (Solar noon for us that day was at 11:58 AM EDT). My Pre-Calculus class took the mean of 5 shadow lengths. We used an inverse tan function to calculate the angle. Using 111.133 km per latitude degree, we calculated our distance to the equator. Using a proportion, we calculated the circumference by taking the product of 360 and our equator distance, and divided by the measured shadow angle.
Received on Wed Mar 21 2012 - 15:41:26 PDT