Ancient Observatories: Making a Sundial using NASA Connect’s Lesson Plan and Nortel LearniT’s Technology Tutorials June 4th, 2006

Construction Sundial built from scratch according to lesson plan design. Measurements were precise and done in centimeters. Teamwork was vital to our success.

Placement A sharpened pencil was used as a gnomon to cast a shadow onto the marking paper. The gnomon is the part of a sundial which casts the shadow. Gnomon is an ancient Greek word meaning "indicator" or "one who discerns." Sundial placed in parking lot using parking grid as a guide.

Data Collection Every half hour we recorded the position of the shadow and noted the time. We used digital photography to make a time lapse image of the shadow cast by the sun’s movement.

Image Processing We cropped and matched the images to each other for position and contrast using Adobe Photoshop.

Time Lapse We took the photos of the sundial and put them together in Macromedia Flash to show the time lapse. Click here to see the movie.

True North We used Google Earth to find the Career Center parking lot and aligned our measurements with the parking grid. We determined that our calculation of true north was very close.