A Sky-Log Kiosk for the School Garden

The Garden Sky-Log Project

The school garden club is building a sky-log kiosk beside its raised beds. Visitors will be able to compare a shadow record, a daylight display, and a star-watching calendar. Before building the kiosk, the club must decide which graphs and messages fit its observations. The garden has an open area away from tall trees and buildings. Students use this same area for all their observations so that a new location does not change what they can see.

For the shadow record, the club observes one upright stick on a clear September day. The stick stays in the same marked spot. At each listed time, students measure from the base of the stick to the tip of its shadow. They also record which side of the stick the shadow reaches toward. They change only the observation time, not the stick or its position. The measurements belong to this particular stick and day; another stick or another date could give different lengths.

For the daylight display, the club records sunrise and sunset in September and December. The school is in the northern United States. In the September record, sunrise is about 6 AM and sunset is about 6 PM. The club rounds the daylight and nighttime totals to whole hours. Each full day lasts 24 hours. Earth turns once in about that time. A location faces toward the Sun during daylight and away from the Sun during night.

For the star calendar, an adult supervises evening observations. Students look from the same open area at 9 PM on ten clear nights in each listed month. They record whether the entire star group called Orion is above the horizon and visible. Orion is a constellation: a named pattern of stars. The team uses the same viewing time because changing the hour could change which stars are visible. The records show what students could see from this garden, not whether those stars still existed.