davidamcclain’s posterous

Last June I placed some photographic film into a tin cannister with a small hole punched into its side. The tin cannister was then attached to a clothes pole in my backgarden and left.

This afternoon I fetched the cannister and took the photographic film out. My son John scanned the photographic film and with the aid of some image software made the image negative.
The result is the picture above.
The picture clearly shows the path of the sun through the sky over the last six months.
I believe you can see we didn`t have a great summer by the broken lines at the top. More sun shone in the month of October.

This has been a fascinating simple project that was carried out very easily.
If you want to try out the project then follow the link below.
In a few weeks time it will be the winter solstice when the sun will be in its lowest arc across the sky. Try it out over the next six months and make a record of the sun`s path yourself.

Solar Path Experiment

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Physics News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.