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Projects: EarthDialsEarthDial Newsletter No. 1119 September 2004 Upcoming Events. Here are some events for all EDers to heed: - Autumnal Equinox (for Earth's Northern Hemisphere) on 21 September at 1630 GMT - try to make a movie of your EDs shadow on or near that day. Check out existing movies at the animations page. We hope eventually to make these into an educational package. Please continue to make them over the entire range of the seasons, so that we'll be able to see how the daily tracks change over seasons, over time of day, and over latitude! As you know, we lost ED-11 (Ethan Dicks) at the South Pole on the March equinox because the sun set on him for six months, but Ethan tells us he will be "restarting" his ED when the Sun finally pokes its head above the horizon in late September. Hurrah! - Full Moon on 28 September at 1309 GMT - try to make a movie of the Moon's shadow also (no one has yet done this); this can be done anytime within a few days of full moon - outside that the shadow becomes too weak. Even if you can't make a movie, please capture some individual images. Note: any sundial can also be a moondial (with a bit of interpretation). At full moon, it's easiest: the local solar time is exactly what you read for the moon's shadow, except it's, say, 2 AM rather than 2 PM ! - Winter Solstice (for Mars's Southern Hemisphere) on 20 September (Earth Calendar). The Mars Rovers, complete with their MarsDials, are still in excellent health and this event is a meaningful one for them, located as they are at 2 deg South (Opportunity at Meridiani Plain) and 15 deg S latitude (Spirit at Gusev Crater). The sun will now stop moving north (it gets as high as an aereocentric (Mars-centered) declination of +25.2 deg) and start "coming back" ("sol-stice" means "sun-stopping"). From now on, every day the sun becomes a bit higher in the Rovers' sky. (But remember that each season on Mars is almost twice as long as Earth's.) This means that the solar panels can supply more power to all the electronics, allowing more maneuvering and scientific data to be gathered. By now, there have been perhaps 10,000 images that include the MarsDials (after all, they are calibration devices for the cameras!). Check out the complete gallery of "Pancam" raw images available at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/ . New EarthDials. Since the last Newsletter in June, we have four new EarthDials (ED-18 through ED-21), located in Mississippi and Georgia USA, in Latvia (our most northern yet at 57 deg N!), and in Venezuela (our first in South America - all continents now covered except for Africa and Australia!). Welcome aboard. Unfortunately, ED-2 (Maryland, USA) has had to retire, and, after almost a decade, the Webcam for our "associate" EDA-1 (Wisconsin, USA) has ceased. So there are now *20* active EarthDials (in *8* countries) and they are: ED-1 Seattle, Washington, USA (122 W, 48 N) - Bill Nye's "standard" We know of people actively working on new EDs in India, Singapore, Brazil, and Ecuador. In addition there are US ones expected in Hawaii and Maryland. Please do anything you can to help us fill in those empty latitudes and longitudes around the globe! NASS Sawyer Prize. The EarthDial and MarsDial Projects were awarded the 2004 Sawyer Prize of the North American Sundial Society at its annual meeting in August. Bill Nye and I gratefully accepted it as the representatives of all of you. Duration of Project. Good news! The Planetary Society has allocated funds so that the EarthDial Project will stay going until at least March 2005 and perhaps beyond. Cheers, Woody |
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