Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 01/12/2008 - 09:40
Forums
Antarctic Weather Stations

I'm going to try this again.  Hi, my name is Michelle Yates.  I teach middle school science in Texas.  Currently, my graduate class is studying local noon and sun plots.  We had a couple questions that hopefully you or the team can help us with.  First, What time is local noon in Antartica this time of year?  Secondly, we were wondering if anyone has recorded a sun plot there?  If you have, we were hoping to get a copy of one to compare ours to yours and take it back to our classes to study them.  Thanks.

Sun, 01/13/2008 - 01:42

Kirk Beckendorf

Hi Michelle,Imagine me recieving your message today. It is the clearest that it has been here since I got here and I can actually se the sun.
Here is the information about solar/local noon. You can find this information for other locations or dates at...
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=1032

Jan 12, 2008
Up all day
 
 
2:02 PM
34.0°
 

Jan 13, 2008
Up all day
 
 
2:02 PM
33.8°
 

Jan 14, 2008
Up all day
 
 
2:02 PM
33.6°

 
Thank you sooo much for asking about this. I had not actually seen one printed for McMurdo. I made one for McMurdo using the following website, what a great teaching tool it will be. I cannot attach, or paste the one that I made but you can make one yourself (for any location) using this website.
http://solardat.uoregon.edu/PolarSunChartProgram.html
You will need to know the latitude and longitude and the time zone. There are a number of other selections that you can make. I like the Polar Chart and using the local time zone, but that is just my personal preference.
Here is McMurdo's location and we are 12+ UTC.

Latitude:
77.8
South

Longitude:
166.6
East

 
Hope this all helps and hope to hear from you again..
Have fun in class!!!
Kirk
There is a sundial right outside so I went and took a picture of it today 1-13-08 at  between 2:00 and 2:10PM. Here is the photo, there is another from a different angle in the gallery. As you can see it is not quite what you would expect.