Friday, March 20, 2009

Journey North Mystery Class progress

With the equinox here, we saw some really interesting data for Journey North today. So interesting we decided to spend most of our school day exploring it.

Pictured is our photoperiod graph. As you can see, all the photoperiods from around the world are converging around the 12 hour mark for the equinox.

We were also told that sunrise today in Greenwich, England was 06:03 UT (Universal Time, a.k.a. GMT) then given a table with the sunrise in UT for our 10 mystery classes we are trying to find. It takes the earth 4 minutes to move 1 degree west, so we could calculate our longitude based on this information. I made the calculation for all 10 locations, though the one we're focusing on is E 6.5 degrees (we already figured out from our photoperiod that it was N 4 degrees.) It looks to be in Cameroon, which for our family was quite special since the Pope wrapped up his visit to that country just yesterday.

4 comments:

Shannon said...

Wow - the Journey North project looks really neat! I'll have to Google and find out more about it.
Love your blog!
Blessings,
Shannon @ Song of My Heart

Dana Leeds said...

Hi, Kris. We're really enjoying the JN Mystery Class - it's our first time! Anyway, I must have missed something. How did you figure out the latitude from the photoperiod? We just took some ballpark guesses. Thanks! Dana

Kris said...

One of the things I like about blog carnivals is finding out about other inspiring blogs, like the ones Shannon and Dana have. Thanks, Shannon, for hosting the Charlotte Mason blog carnival and thanks, Dana, for hosting the Hands On Homeschool carnival!

Shannon, I found the Journey North through Dana's blog, LOL! It's put together by Annenberg media and they have a bunch of projects besides the Mystery Class that people can sign up for. The site is learner.org/jnorth

Dana, I posted an answer on your recent Journey North post.

Dana Leeds said...

Thanks for the tip about calculating latitude. I had just been on vacation and I guess I didn't catch that. Anyway, we finished calculating the longitudes today and I'm going to try to do the latitudes tomorrow. Thanks!!!