Activity: How far is Sun?

In this activity, you have to find the distance of the Sun through a simple experiment. In the experiment, you have to
make your own pin hole projector for observing sun and then find the distance using it as per the procedure shown
in the session.

Materials required

1. Cardboard box ( Atleast 20 centimeters in length)

2. Pencil or Pen
3. Pin
4. Scale
5. Butter paper
6. Calculator
7. Scissor
8. Tape

Procedure

How to make pin hole projector box?

1. Take a cardboard box and make a pin hole on one of the shorter side of the box.
2. Exactly on the opposite side to which hole is made, make a rectangular window or remove that part of
cardboard.
3. Cover the rectangular window with the butter paper.
4. Stand with your face toward the Sun. Place the box over your head with the pinhole towards the Sun. Adjust
your position until you see a small projection, a reversed image, of the Sun on the butter paper on the other
side. Make sure you are getting a sharp image of the sun on the screen.

How to measure the distance of the sun?

1. While looking at the image of the sun on the pin hole projector, take a pencil and draw the outline of the
image that you are seeing on the paper.
2. To find the distance of the sun, following formula is used
Diameter of the Sun = Diameter of image of the sun
Distance from Sun to Earth Distance from pin hole to image
3. After simplifying the above formula, we get
Distance from Earth to Sun = (Diameter of Sun * Distance from pin hole to image) / Diameter of image of Sun
4. Out of the 4 terms given above, value for diameter of sun is approximately 1.4 million kilometers or 1400000
kms.
5. To find the diameter of the image of sun, take a scale and measure the diameter of the image that you have
drawn through projection method.
6. To find the distance of image from pin hole, take a scale and find the distance between the pinhole and the
butter paper.
7. Put the values in the formula given in Step 2 to get answer.
Observation log

- Date of Experiment -
- Diameter of Sun -
- Diameter of image of Sun (Measurement) –
- Distance
- Calculations

- Distance of Sun (from calculation ) =

- Distance of Sun ( Actual Average distance ) = 150,000,000 kilometers
- Error = Distance of Sun (Actual Average distance ) - Distance of Sun (from Calculation )

- Error percent = (Error / Distance of Sun (Actual Average distance ) ) * 100

How to perform activity (Images are for reference)

1. To make the projection box

Front part (F) Back part (B)

Back part (B)

Front part (F)
2. How to get the image of the sun
Step 1 – Hold the box as shown in the picture keeping
pin hole towards the sun.

Step 2 – While 1st person is holding the box, second

person will go on the back side and mark the image of
sun.

Step 3 – Draw the outline of the sun as seen on the

paper.
Step 1

Step 2 Step 3

3. How to do measurements
Step 1 – To measure the diameter of image of sun, take a scale and measure the diameter of the image. The image
shown in the step 1 is the enlarged image of sun shown for demonstration purpose only. In actual it will be smaller.
Step 2 – To measure the distance of the image from pinhole, take a scale and measure the length of longer edge.

Step 1 Step 2