Friday, March 7, 2008

Tallest Pyramid in the Yucatan

Working our way home....here at Cobá...where you can still climb the tallest pyramid in the Yucatan Peninsula...it is quite a climb and today it was very very windy.
The view is spectacular and we were trying to figure out how far away was the horizon?.....as geographers we thought we should know that...so googled it when we got home and the answer is not so simple....complex formulas take into account the curvature of the earth and refraction of light and so on..but for all practical purposes the formula is this.... SquareRoot(height of eye above surface in feet / 0.5736) = distance to horizon in miles.....so we will use the height of the pyramid as we were on the top....SquareRoot(137 feet/ 0.5736) = 15.45 miles to the horizon. Or for yall in the metric world it is
SquareRoot(height above surface in centimeters / 6.752) = distance to horizon in kilometers....SquareRoot (4200 cm/6.752) = 24.94 kilometers!Of course I was not thinking of that on my descent...more concerned about keeping my skirt down.

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