The Use of Elementary Trigonometry and Geometric Measurement - Lab Report Example

Another partner played a role in measuring the distance from the eye of the person holding the ruler to the ruler itself while making sure that the widest size of the moon is taken into consideration. From this mode, the shortest side of the triangle was represented by the distance between thumbnails (D), while the longest distance represented the distance from the ruler to the eye (d). The angle made by the triangle represents the moon’s angular diameter (in arcseconds).

However, the most important determining fact is the location of the experiment relative to the moon as well as the accuracy and the experience of the individual astronomer engaged in the experimentation. Given that the value obtained from this experiment reported an error of about 99 per cent compared with the actual distance of the moon previously reported in the literature as 384,000 km (Reis, 1), it showed that the distance obtained largely depended on the astronomer’s approximation. When the person carrying out the experiment is closer to the moon, a larger size is likely to be obtained as opposed to when the experiment is done from quite a distance. Therefore, the discrepancy noted in this observation could be attributed to the distance of the moon and the inaccuracy in measurements that are common in estimations.