09-23-2015, 08:54 AM
Thanks, Ino, for the link. I have been trying to explain this to students and folks in general for decades, including the idea that there are two highest angle in the sky days for the sun, equidistant from the summer solstice (and the reverse for lowest in the sky) in the tropics depending on the distance from the equator.
I never could explain it well, since I only realized it when teaching in Bangkok in the 90's. I had the students construct a longhand multi-line graph of a year of sunrise, sunset, length of day, and height of sun in sky. The labored quite a while turning the list of daily data of each for Bangkok I printed from the earlier days of the Internet into a huge graph.
Of course I was telling them about how the solstices will show clearly where peaks and valleys meet of the various lunes in the graph. But as you likely know they showed more complexity than that. We all learned something.
In any case the point of the exercise came when I showed them how to take the data, copy and paste it into spreadsheet (AppleWorks, at the time), tweak a couple commands have have the software graph it. Their weeks of work turned into a pretty big group groan about all their "wasted" time. Good stuff.
I couldn't find a similar graph in my cursory searches online to show what I was talking about afterwards.
BTW, we should agree to keep this info from the solstice and Equinox celebrators, doncha think?
Well recess duty is over...off topic anyway, I guess.
Cheers,
Kirt
I never could explain it well, since I only realized it when teaching in Bangkok in the 90's. I had the students construct a longhand multi-line graph of a year of sunrise, sunset, length of day, and height of sun in sky. The labored quite a while turning the list of daily data of each for Bangkok I printed from the earlier days of the Internet into a huge graph.
Of course I was telling them about how the solstices will show clearly where peaks and valleys meet of the various lunes in the graph. But as you likely know they showed more complexity than that. We all learned something.
In any case the point of the exercise came when I showed them how to take the data, copy and paste it into spreadsheet (AppleWorks, at the time), tweak a couple commands have have the software graph it. Their weeks of work turned into a pretty big group groan about all their "wasted" time. Good stuff.
I couldn't find a similar graph in my cursory searches online to show what I was talking about afterwards.
BTW, we should agree to keep this info from the solstice and Equinox celebrators, doncha think?
Well recess duty is over...off topic anyway, I guess.
Cheers,
Kirt