8
$\begingroup$

I am by no means a mathmatician. I guess you could say that I am a mathematically inclined individual, but never made anything of it until I was in my 30's and became a software engineer. Although I've never taken the math classes that I should have, the concepts still fascinate me, and I have a question.

I was watching an episode of Numb3rs and they stated what seemed like a fairly simple geometry/trigonometry question that I just could not wrap my brain around entirely.

They stated that with a few photos of the same location, by looking at the shadows caused by the sun, and knowing 1 distance in the pics and knowing the "exact" time stamp of the images, that they could calculate the exact (within a hundredth of a degree) location of the photos.

As I said before, I am no math expert, but wouldn't you also need 1 angle? Is what they said accurate? Could you calculate the angle based on the timestamps and the shadows given the height of the object that made the shadow?

Edit: I'm curious, If I posted 4 pictures (15 min apart, with accurate timestamps) with at least 1 item that was a known length, would some one take me up on the challenge of locating where the photos were taken?

  • 0
    The sun moves over the time and its relative movement is different considering different places on earth. You can easily extract an angle if you know a distance from the picture too.2011-07-09
  • 3
    There exists a book Devlin K., Lorden G. The numbers behind NUMB3RS http://books.google.com/books?id=Wm6SCRVby0kC Although I do not think that htey deal with this particular question, it might be interesting for you, if you're a fan of that series.2011-07-09
  • 1
    It's a modern twist on the Sherlock Holmes story ‘[The Musgrave Ritual](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/834/834-h/834-h.htm#2H_4_0005)’2011-07-09

1 Answers 1