Urban Skills: Dishing Out Directions
My Daddy learned how to track, trap, and skin a batch of critters when he was a kid. It turns out that those skills are of limited use in, say, the wilds of Chicago. Equivalent urban skills do, however, exist. Starting today, I’ll be passing along a few.
If one is lost, looking for moss on the north side of the Hancock Building may be inconvenient. On the other hand, checking an installed TV satellite dish (those are the dishes that are about 3 feet wide; see photo) can provide a quick and dirty orientation.
If properly positioned (and they won’t work otherwise), TV satellite dishes in the Northern Hemisphere are pointing to a position somewhere southward of Texas (in New York, they will point to the southwest; In Los Angeles, they will point to the southeast).
Official Eighth Grade Science Stuff: The dishes point to the transmission satellites located 22,300 miles above the equator, an altitude that results in an orbital period equal to the Earth’s period of rotation (AKA Sidereal Day), While these satellites travel from west to east, they appear stationary to observers on Earth because they move at exactly the same speed as the Earth’s rotation, producing a geostationary orbit.
