Locate Virginia on the Globe - and in the Galaxy
If an online mapper/spatial data engine offers you the option of entering bounding rectangle coordinates for latitude/longitude, use the following for Virginia:
- Northernmost : 39.455826 (we're in the Northern Hemisphere, so latitude is a positive number)
- Southernmost: 36.549072
- Westernmost: -83.667404 (remember the minus sign for our longitude; we're west of the zero degree or "prime" meridian)
- Easternmost: -75.225754
- Southernmost: 36.549072
(If you want to change your attitude by changing your latitude, fly to 24.555734 degrees North, -81.802984 west so you can enjoy a drink with an umbrella in Margaritaville.)
- How fast is Virginia moving, due to the spinning of the earth once a day around the axis?
- Virginia residents are moving a little slower around the axis that people standing on the equator. The circle around which Virginia spins is slightly smaller than the equator (by a factor of the cosine of the latitude). You can create an equation to measure the speed at a location "L," where L is the latitude: cos(L) x 1,070 miles/hr= speed of rotation.1
Complete the math for the Fairfax campus of GMU (38.836348 degrees north), and students sitting in classrooms are moving at 833mph - faster than the speed of sound.
- How fast is Virginia moving around the Sun in its annual revolution?
- Assuming the average distance from the Earth to the sun is 93 million miles (in summertime, Virginia is actually further away from the sun than in winter), the formula is 2 X pi X r/t = 2 X pi X 93,000,000/365.2564/24 = 66,658 miles per hour.
- How fast is Virginia and other parts of the Milky Way galaxy moving through intergalactic space?
- Roughly 500-570,000 mph2
Find a Particular Place in Virginia
References
1. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), "Ask the Space Scientist," http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/a10840.html (last checked September 21, 2010)
2. Scientific American, "The Milky Weigh Galaxy," http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=the-milky-weigh-galaxy-2009-01-05 (last checked September 21, 2010)
