jawsnap photo
Photographs by Jonathan Wilson
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Foucault Pendulum
5/31/08 The outer container for the Foucault pendulum at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. My little compact camera had trouble taking a photo of the pendulum itself, but it has a great macro mode and I thought the numbers on the side looked cool. At the poles, it takes 24 hours for the pendulum to knock down all the pegs in a circle, and at the equator, it doesn't move at all. In Los Angeles it takes about 42 hours, so the outer container was split into 42 sections and labeled. In retrospect I should have taken a photo of #31 because today is the 31st, but it's a little late to go back now.
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