Tuesday, July 19, 2005
garden sun study
the true purpose of this post is to reveal how much of a nerd i am. the image is a sun study i did this morning to see how much sun will hit my garden plot over the year and whether there will be enough light to keep plants healthy through the winter. it looks promising. my garden site is more or less south facing and the hill to the south appears to be just short enough to let the sun clear it on the darkest day of the year, december 21st.
my soil sedimentation experiement seems to be telling me that my soil is almost all sand. i live on a piece of land that was probably once river bottom, so the sand doesn't surprise me. by the way, you can get sun angle and azimuth from the navy for anywhere in the united states for any day of the year. go navy! the sun study kind of looks like bomb damage assesment diagrams the military parades out during blitzes to show how good they are at blowing things up.
card: tower: gourd on high: sudden change, release, downfall, revelation.
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3 comments:
This is interesting. How did you plot the locations? I am considereing putting a cold frame against the south side of the house but am unsure if the neighbor's house will block the sun during the winter months.
i grabbed an aerial photo of my place from terraserver. then i got the sun position data from the navy (at the link in the post) for june 21 and dec 21, the two extremes of sun position for the year. in photoshop, i created a layer for each date and time, drew an arrow facing down then rotated it by the angles indicated by the sun position data. to figure out where sun will fall you also have to consider the sun's azimuth (angle above the horizon). i've got a hill to the south of my garden. there are several ways to figure the angle of a distant hill. here's how i did it. you need a level, tape measure and calculator with trig functions. level the level in the direction of the hill. sight from the end of the level farthest from the hill and, holding a tape measure at the other end, note the place on the tape where the top of the hill appears. let's say 24". now, with the calculator, divide that reading (24") by the length of the level (36") to get 0.667. take the inverse tangent of that to get the angle, 33.69 degrees. if the sun's azimuth is below this it won't clear the hill.
if all this math scares you, you can also use a level, protractor and a stick and simply take a reading off of level. but, i didn't have a protractor, and i did have a calculator!
Thanks for the directions. It makes sense, even the math. I had kind of figured out the protractor idea after posting the comment but hadn't considered the photoshop aspect. Good luck with your garden and thanks again.
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