Solar Trajectory Lab

  

The objective of this lab is to learn how to gather data to make a solar trajectory determination. This lab also involves the idea of seasonality. For this lab, I went to study the 20ft pole in front of the Medical School building to see how long the sun cast the shadow on it during different times of the day. I recorded the physical direction of the shadow and also used the compass on my phone to figure out the exact degree of the direction. The materials we used for this lab were a ruler, a pole, compass, our lab notebook, SunCalc.net and a calculator.

 

The data table containing the information to make the graph is shown below.

 

	Height of Pole	Time of Day	Length of shadow	Direction of shadow	Tangent  in decimal	Degree of shadow
Data point 1	20	9:00 AM	23 ft.	E	.86956	41
Data Point 2	20	11:15 AM	18 ft.	N-NE	1.11	48
Data point 3	20	12:00 PM	20 ft.	N	1	45
Data point 4	20	1:00 PM	23 ft.	N-NW	.86956	41
Data point 5	20	5:00	27 ft.	W	.7407	37

 

SunCalc.net version of the graph on 22nd of January, 2014 at the Medical School's flag pole used in the lab is shown below.

 

 

 

 

Below is the graph of the data points from January 22, 2014-January 30, 2014.