Purpose: Introduce students to the geographic coordinate system, its relationship to time zones and ancient and modern methods of establishing the location of points on the Earth's surface.
The most basic data to a geographer are geographic coordinates. Coordinate information allows us to map features relative to each other and show spatial relationships. The global coordinate system is known as latitude and longitude. These are spherical coordinates, based on angles rather than distances, which can be used to precisely define any location on Earth. In this lab we will find locations with the geographic grid, understand the relationship between time and longitude, and estimate latitude by star gazing as the Polynesian navigators did.
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| The image above shows where zero degrees longitude is defined. It is taken looking along the Prime Meridian etched into the courtyard at the Greenwich Observatory looking north toward the eyepiece of the original Transit Telescope, whose crosshairs were used as the reference origin for the longitude grid of the entire Earth. | ||