Related papers: Fixing the shadows while moving the gnomon
It is well known that the length and orientation of a shadow cast by a vertical gnomon depends on the time of the day and on the season of the year. But it also depends on the latitude of the site of observation. During the equinoxes, the…
A didactic sequence of activities on some topics of Astronomy, related mainly with the length and orientation of shadows cast by a gnomon, the movement of shadows during daytime in different seasons of the year, and finding the true…
The observation that the shadows of objects change during the course of the day and also for a fixed time during a year led curious minds to realize that the Sun could be used as a timekeeper. However, the daily motion of the Sun has some…
Large scale shadows from buildings in a city play an important role in determining the environmental quality of public spaces. They can be both beneficial, such as for pedestrians during summer, and detrimental, by impacting vegetation and…
Sundials and gnomons pointing out dates and times are a beautiful reminder of how we understand the movement of the Sun and use it to structure day and year. They also encapsulate the basic astronomical knowledge and concepts of the…
A method to measure the seeing from video made during drift-scan solar transits is proposed. The limb of the Sun is projected over a regular grid evenly spaced. The temporal dispersion of the time intervals among the contacts between solar…
Among the first devices used to measure the time we find the sundials and the water-clocks, as told by Vitruvius in his book on the Architecture. The sundials work because of the shadows cast by a rod or pole, the gnomon, on their…
We present a modern reconstruction of the classical formula, first derived by medieval Arab astronomers, that describes the trajectory of the tip of a gnomon's shadow during the day as a function of latitude, solar declination, and gnomon…
The parallel globe is an old, very simple and ingenious device that, when systematically employed in astronomy classes, becomes a teaching tool with great potential. Properly oriented according to the local meridian, this instrument allows…
We have examined how the characteristics of the tachocline -- i.e., the change in rotation rate $\delta\Omega$, or the "jump", the position of the midpoint of the tachocline, $r_d$, and the width of the tachocline, $w_d$, -- change as a…
Second part of a didactic sequence of activities on some topics of Astronomy, related mainly with the real shape of the Earth, the gravitational interactions between our planet and other celestial bodies, and the resulting movement of the…
The shadow is a separated feature in the satellite images specially high resolution images. It may be looked as a problem when it causes a loss in the ground ray response to the shaded area, and may be, from other view, considered as an…
Starspots are cooler and darker than the stellar surface. Therefore, the emitted flux of a star changes when spots are visible on its surface. The presence of spots together with the stellar rotation leads to a periodic modulation on the…
Chlamydomonas shows both positive and negative phototaxis. It has a single eyespot near its equator and as the cell rotates during forward motion the light signal received by the eyespot varies. We use a simple mechanical model of…
Using over 40 million muons collected since 1989 by the MACRO detector we have searched for a depletion of muons coming from the direction of the Moon due to primary cosmic rays striking the Moon. We observe this Moon shadow in the expected…
We review a recently proposed approach to the problem of alternating signs for fermionic many body Monte Carlo simulations in finite temperature simulations. We derive an estimate for fermion wandering lengths and introduce the notion of…
The Clementine gnomon has been built in 1702 to measure the Earth's obliquity variation. For this reason the pinhole was located in the walls of Diocletian's times (305 a. D.) in order to remain stable along the centuries, but its original…
We analyze the peculiar seasonal effects in the day-night asymmetry of solar neutrinos, namely those connected with the neutrino nighttime flux anomaly near the winter solstice. We show that, for certain placements of the neutrino detector,…
The prospect of identifying wormholes by investigating the shadows of wormholes constitute a foremost source of insight into the evolution of compact objects and it is one of the essential problems in contemporary astrophysics. The nature…
Rotation of the large scale solar magnetic field has a great importance for the understanding of solar dynamic, for the search of longitidinal structure and for the study of solar-terrestrial relations. 30-year long observations taken at…