Watching the Seasons Go By

A Bit on Snow on the Soil in the Backyard

A couple of days ago we had a little snow in Vancouver, so I
repeated the experiment of the New Year. I measured how far the snow line was from my fence. I got eight feet. That told me that the Sun was arctan(5/8) or 32 degrees above the horizon at noon. We are at latitude 49, so the Sun is now at 49 - (90 - 32) = -9 degrees, so the Sun is 9 degrees below the equator. We're getting closer to the beginning of spring when the Sun crosses over the equator just under one month from today.

Checking with Stellarium, the Sun is officially was a smidgen over 10 degrees south of the equator at noon yesterday, so once again our snowy sextant has down quite well.