Related papers: Earth radius from a single sunrise image: a classr…
It is shown how repeated observations of the sunset from various points up a tall building can be used to determine the Earth's radius. The same observations can also be used, at some latitudes, to deduce an approximate value for the amount…
In the Tuscan Archipelago (Italy) it's possible to make an approximate measurement of the Earth's radius from the Elba Island using the Pianosa Island as a ship that appears and disappears on the horizon depending on the observer's height…
This activity has been developed as a resource for the "EU Space Awareness" educational programme. As part of the suite "Our Fragile Planet" together with the "Climate Box" it addresses aspects of weather phenomena, the Earth's climate and…
I describe how to obtain a rather good experimental determination of the eccentricity of the Earth orbit, as well as the obliquity of the Earth rotation axis, by measuring, over the course of a year, the elevation of the Sun as a function…
The article dwells upon the Earth remote sensing data as one of the basic directions of Geo-Information Science, a unique source of information on processes and phenomena occurring in almost all spheres of the Earth geographic shell…
We proposed an analytical model for the calculus of illumination time of the Earth for any time of year and any latitude, this model assumes the obliquity of the ecliptic as constant, the light beams as parallels, the Earth as spherical,…
Solar activity is controlled by the magnetic field, which also causes the variability of the solar irradiance that in turn is thought to influence the climate on Earth. The magnetic field manifests itself in the form of structures of…
The global transition towards cleaner and more sustainable energy production is a major challenge. We present an innovative solution by utilizing smartphone light sensors to measure direct normal solar irradiance, the primary component of…
In this work, we measure the volumetric mean radius of the Earth, reproducing the historical experiment of Eratosthenes, carried out around 240 BC, in the ancient cities of Siena and Alexandria. Here, we perform measurements in the cities…
In this work we study in details the influence of pure astronomical refraction on solar metrologic measurements made from ground-based full disk imagery and provide the tools for correcting the measurements and estimating the associated…
I present a novel macroscopic wave geometric effect of the sunbeam occurring when the sunbeam directional (shadow by a bar) angle c velocity is observed on the earth surface and a sunbeam global positioning device with a needle at the…
Solar irradiance is fundamental data crucial for analyses related to weather and climate. High-precision estimation models are necessary to create areal data for solar irradiance. In this study, we developed a novel estimation model by…
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…
Parallax is the most important astronomical method for determining the distances from the Earth to nearby stars. We present two hands-on activities that explore the concepts and practice of parallax measurement. The first activity is a…
This paper describes Sunrise, a parallel, free Monte-Carlo code for the calculation of radiation transfer through astronomical dust. Sunrise uses an adaptive-mesh refinement grid to describe arbitrary geometries of emitting and…
We perform Monte Carlo simulations of cosmic ray-induced hard X-ray radiation from the Earth's atmosphere. We find that the shape of the spectrum emergent from the atmosphere in the energy range 25-300 keV is mainly determined by Compton…
How much does a single image reveal about the environment it was taken in? In this paper, we investigate how much of that information can be retrieved from a foreground object, combined with the background (i.e. the visible part of the…
Surveillance and surveying are two important applications of empirical research. A major part of terrain modelling is supported by photographic surveys which are used for capturing expansive natural surfaces using a wide range of sensors --…
We propose a data-driven learned sky model, which we use for outdoor lighting estimation from a single image. As no large-scale dataset of images and their corresponding ground truth illumination is readily available, we use complementary…
The Sunrise balloon-borne solar observatory consists of a 1m aperture Gregory telescope, a UV filter imager, an imaging vector polarimeter, an image stabilization system and further infrastructure. The first science flight of Sunrise…