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These are the results obtained by our group of french students.
We live in Draguignan, in the South of France and we are studying in the "Lycee Jean Moulin". We were very lucky last Tuesday and had very nice weather to observe the Sun during the whole day and the Moon during its eclipse...
Our first experiment was to find our local noon.
With a short 10 cm vertical gnomon, we could pick up the successive positions of its shadow :
You can compute, as we did, that our local noon occured at 11h30min. The shortest shadow, at this time was 8.7 cm.
We could calculate the height of the Sun at local noon:
Arctan(10/8.7) = 49o
and deduce our latitude: 43 Degrees 30 Minutes...
We had also the pleasure to observe very well the moon eclipse. We observed the beginning of the totality at 18h12 and its end at 19h18 (Universal Time).
So, we can say that the total eclipse ended 7h 48min after the local noon! In London it occured 7h 21min after the local noon: so, we can deduce a (longitude) difference of 27 min between London and Draguignan: As one hour corresponds to 15 degrees, we can deduce that our longitude is 6.75 Degrees East...
Nice, isn't it!
We would be very happy to receive some reports from other groups who did the same experiments...
Thanks in advance!
Drawings will be welcome too. By clicking on the line below you get the mailserver. Then write the information about your observations in the space reserved for the message.
Have a nice time!