Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Sun Tracker

Here is a demonstration that probably won't work, but it was fun to make.  It is an image of the path of the corner of my building throughout the year.  Each black curve is the path through the day (call it an equi-day curve) and each red curve is the path of the shadow at the same time every day (on your watch) throughout the year (call it an equi-time curve).  The green dot should be the current position of the end of a shadow of a vertical pole of height 1 m, and the black line from the origin to the green dot is the shadow.  The darker black curve and darker red curve are the current equi-day and equi-time curves (related to the analemma).  Note that if you are viewing this when UTC-5 (Eastern Standard Time) is dark, there shouldn't be any figures.  Also, you really have to be patient/fight with the CDF plugin to get it to work.  But it did work on a random windows machine...  Good luck.

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