Sometimes I feel like I'm stuck in a bad Star Trek joke:
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CT Co-ordinator, Paintball Marshals -
You don't need to wait for an equinox or a solstice.Originally posted by Pyrate Jim
If it's dark enough where you are at night and your Captain has good enough eyes, have him compute your latitude using Polaris. If the polar axis has shifted as much as you think it has, then he'll get something far removed from 41.5 degrees north. I suspect he's going to come back with nothing out of the ordinary.
I agree, the sun's position _at_local_solar_noon_ should always be towards the south if you're standing at 41 degrees north latitude. However, this is absolutely not the case at other times of the day. The further north you travel, the further north of direct east/west the sun generally appears at sunrise/sunset. As an example, at local midnight on June 22, 2012 the position of the sun in the sky over Murmansk is above the horizon and _due_north_!Originally posted by Pyrate JimComment
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Leap day!
Little off topic here, but still celestial mechanics.
We add a day every four years to the Gregorian Calendar to compensate for the discrepency between the Solar Year (Equinox to Equinox) and the Siderial year (fixed star to fixed star).
But it ain't quite six hours every year, is it?
Pope Innocent the First worked out back in the tenth century that those few minutes short each year would add up to a full day about once every 400 years. He proposed skipping any leap year that ended in double-zeros and was divisible by four.
By that reasoning, the year 2000 should not have been a leap year.
I read somewhere that the Julian Calendar (popular before the adoption of the Gregorian and still listed in the Old Farmers Almanac) ~ They saved up all those leap-days until they simply dropped an entire year...CT Co-ordinator, Paintball MarshalsComment
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Originally posted by Pyrate Jim
That was posted back in '09, and it's a mere projection. It has nothing to do with the truth as we know it.
The funny thing about this particular CGI is that if you look at it, the North Pole "just happens" to be placed somewhere in the same region of Russia that I posted...
Another coincidence?CT Co-ordinator, Paintball MarshalsComment
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A video posted by an organization dedicated to preparing for "economic depression, world war III, food & water shortage, martial law, exponential conscious evolution, earth changes, geophysical and magnetic pole shift, passing galactic equator, and entering a new ice age."?Originally posted by Pyrate Jim
I think "nothing to do with the truth" is a far more accurate assessment than "another concidence?". I'd also have to say that I think the organization's founder, Ivan Stein, is a nut.
Back to the measurement at hand... let us know when your Captain has made his sextant measurements. The spring equinox is less than a week away. I'll go ahead and make a prediction that he will find the sun's elevation above the horizon at noon on March 20 to be nearly 49 degrees, give or take a couple of degrees to account for any error in his measurements.Comment
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Turns out me Cap'n can be left out...
But I did a little bit of simple geometry by putting a level board with a rod of known height and measuring the length of the shadow.
At 1:15 PM the shadow reached it's minimum distance to the rod.
That gave an angle of about 41 degrees. Which is as it should be.
I tried to mark the board with a North/South orientation, but I'm not sure about my measurement of the magnetic pole being correct. I know from boy scouts that the two are not perfecly in alignment (even the compass is marked showing the deviation), but the shadow was pretty far off from even that. It crossed that line before noon prior to reaching zenith.
Although lately I've been watching the evening sky where the sun sets and noticed something odd.
I can see Venus and another, much brighter light.
Mars is ascending behind me, Jupiter is not in the sky at night and I haven't seen the moon since the just after the full moon of February.
That's when I first noticed the bright companion to Venus.
Both mars & venus are going along in their orbits which for me is up & down the sky as we rotate beneath, this bright point has been moving basically sideways. First is was below Venus, then about even and now going above it. And it's moving fast compared to the other visible planets.
Go look at it, and watch it for a few days.CT Co-ordinator, Paintball MarshalsComment
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The brighter and faster-moving of those two lights is actually Venus (magnitude -4.5 -- really, really bright). The dimmer of the two is Jupiter (magnitude -2.1 -- still very bright). They're the two brightest objects in the night sky after the moon.
Jupiter is in the sky at night during March of this year, though it's getting lower and lower in the sky each night. The recent proximity of Jupiter and Venus has been a particularly pleasant evening sight. If the sky had been clear the last couple of nights, I would have been able to see a thin crescent moon joining the show... but alas, clouds have foiled my view. Tonight is looking like it might be clear, though. The crescent moon should be above and to the left of Venus.
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