Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Equanoix and Seasons Expiriment

Problem: How does the tilt of the Earth's axis affect the light received by the Earth as it revolves around the sun.

Hypothesis: My hypothesis is as the Earth rotates on its axis there is night and day. Because the Earth is tilted the when on one side the sun shines on the North Pole, in the South Pole it's dark, and also the other way round. The stick which used as an example is going to change length as it rotates.

Experiment: The Earth is tilted 23.5 degree, so, we made a model out of a Styrofoam ball, and we used a pencil to stuck it properly, while the toothpick was used as an axis. The flash light was representing the sun, while the little grid line was put in front of the flash light. My observation was: as we moved  the flash light from the away ball, the grid lines were getting bigger and less visible at the North Pole, while at the equator the lines were more visible and defined. As we brought the grid closer the lines got much more visible at the equator but less visible at Poles. I noticed that when the light is pointing directly to the equator, the grid squares were having the shape of a square, while as you go more to the north the squares were getting more stretched and became more rectangle shaped. This happens because where the light rays are stronger they will produce sharp, well defined shades, and where there is less light the squares will be less visible and sharp. In the real world, where the Sun points directly to the Earth the light will be the strongest. This happens because our Earth has an axis which is an invisible line that goes right through the Earth. This is the reason that we have seasons, without the axis we wouldn't have them, we would just have summer and winter equinox.This is also the reason why there is permanent Summer on the equator and why the Poles have very short and cold summers. 

1 comment:

  1. Very good conclusion and excellent observations. You included good vocabulary and explained what you were observing and why we have seasons. However, the analysis questions and answers are missing from the page int he textbook.

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