Lab 2 Walkthrough and Helpful Tips

Hi everyone! Welcome to our first lab. Today we are learning about solar angles. On this lab,
you’ll be working in your Connect Lab Manual on the assignment “Solar Angles Lab - Where to
go for Spring Break”. Make sure you get your Connect Manual set up and your academic
misconduct form signed. I cannot grade your lab until I have received your misconduct form!

Questions 1 and 2
For the first two questions, you’ll be asked to find the angle of incidence (AOI) for a variety of
locations. You will need to look up the latitude of the cities given to you. This should be
straightforward, but you may need to round your answers when you are filling in the blanks.
For instance, if you get an answer of 43.55°, you may have to round to 44°.

Remember the position of the sun during equinoxes and solstices!

Question 3
Question 3 is a set of matching questions. As a hint, I can tell you that the question at the
bottom:

For example, mountains can impact it because of their ____, which would change the angle that the
sun hits the ground.

When looking at this question, think about a really steep mountain compared to, say, a hill.
Now imagine a sun hitting both of these locations. What is the main factor influencing how the
sun’s rays strike the ground?

Questions 4 and 5
The two multiple-choice questions should be pretty easy to answer. If you are stuck, take a look
at my slides regarding equinoxes and solstices and the position of the sun during different times
of year. You’ll likely find your answer there!
Question 6
For the last question…

This is one of those questions that may be extremely confusing, so I will try to walk you through
this one as best as I possibly can.

The directions state: Uh oh! The administrators at UA decided to move Spring Break up a week and
now you have to figure out the AOI for one of your vacation locations for March 15th! Explain how
you are going to figure this out and make the calculation for one location. Be sure to indicate which
location you have chosen.

Remember when you found the latitude of those cities from the first two questions? You’ll
need to pick one of them for this question. Doesn’t matter which one, so don’t think too hard
about it.

Now that you have your city and its latitude, we need to find the solar declination for March
15th. There are two ways you can do this.

Here’s the hard way:

First, think about where the sun is a week later from March 15 th. In other words, which position
is the sun most likely to be in on or around March 22nd. Hint: Look at slide 6 and 7.

Now think about that magic number of degrees that the AOI changes each week.

So, if we moved that much from the equator, that would be our solar declination. It is
important to note that as spring transitions to summer, the sun will move either north or south
(this is what you must figure out).

That is one way to find your AOI, now let’s look at the easy way. There’s a handy tool called an
analemma that gives us a simplified guide as to where the sun is at a certain time of year. Take
a look at the one below. Can you figure out where the sun is on March 15 th? To the left of the
graph you’ll see some numbers regarding the latitude of the noon sun during that day. Note the
hemisphere!

Now that you have your latitude and the declination of the sun on March 15th, you can find the
zenith angle and the angle of incidence!