Because the sun is due south, the shadow of the stick (or your shadow) will point due north at exactly noon. So you can find north at noon even if you don't have a digital watch. During the rest of the day, a shadow is projected at an angle away from the north. At night, when the sun has gone down, the angle gets smaller until it reaches 0 degrees in the morning when the sun rises again.
In the Northern Hemisphere, if you walk east along the southern edge of a field on a sunny day, your shadow will be getting shorter as you go along. When it reaches its shortest length, which happens around noon, you are directly opposite the rising sun. The sun is directly over your head so you are now facing north.
In the Southern Hemisphere, if you walk west along the northern edge of the same field on a sunny day, your shadow will be getting longer as you go along. When it reaches its longest length, which happens around noon, you are directly opposite the setting sun. The sun is directly above you so you are now facing south.
At other times of the year, the sun is not directly over your head but instead you will see its rays as they strike the ground directly ahead of you. In this case, your shadow will point in the direction that the rays are coming from.
The sun's shadow will move in the opposite direction. They will migrate from west to east in the Northern Hemisphere and will point north at midday. At midday in the Southern Hemisphere, shadows will indicate the south. With experience, you can utilize shadows to detect the direction as well as the time of day.
Shadows are useful for detecting the direction of the wind, but only if it is blowing toward or away from you. If the wind is blowing in different directions at different times of day, then shadows won't help you determine which way it is coming from or going to. Shadows also help with altitude perception: at high altitudes, night falls more quickly than at lower levels. Therefore, at high altitudes, nights are shorter at higher temperatures than at lower levels. Nights are also longer at low altitudes in cold climates than in hot ones. So although nights seem long at lower temperatures, they actually aren't because there are still hours before daybreak.
At noon on a clear sunny day, your shadow is longest; it reaches all the way across the street. Afternoon shadows get shorter because light rays are refracted when they reach the surface of the Earth. At some points on the planet, such as near water or in the mountains, these rays are refracted even more so shadows become smaller in size. On a clear, moonlit night, when no stars are visible, your shadow remains completely black because there is no source of light to reflect off of.
In front of you, you will notice your shadow moving clockwise from left to right. (Which, I assume, is why clocks work in the clockwise direction.) It will also be longer (?) in the morning, shorter at midday when the sun is higher in the sky, and longer again when the sun sets in the west (behind you, on your left.) At midnight, when the sun is directly over your head, your shadow will be stretched out straight behind you.
This depends on how far apart the countries are that you're comparing them to. If they're both equal distance apart, then they have an equal area. However, if one country is closer to the Earth's center than the other, then it will have a smaller area overall. For example, if we look at America and Europe separately, we can see that America is closer to the center of the Earth, so it has a smaller area.
Finally, water has a large area compared to land because it's hard to compare something with dimensions, so we usually just refer to it as "large." Water covers 70% of the Earth's surface area and contains 70% of the Earth's water by mass. That means it contains about 5 times as much water as land.
When the sun is at its greatest point of motion, when it is in the south, the shadow is at its shortest. As the sun lowers towards the horizon after midday, shadows lengthen once again. Because the shadow always points away from the light, it points west at sunrise when the sun is in the east. At sunset, when the sun is in the west, the shadow points east.
The length of your shadow is determined by two factors: how far away you are from the light source and the angle at which you stand with respect to the direction of the sunlight. If you are very close to the light source, such as under a sunny tree, then you will see that your shadow is short. If you were to walk up to the tree and look into its trunk, you would see that your shadow disappears! This is because there are no longer any branches near enough to cast a shadow.
For example, if you were to stand in the middle of Broadway on a sunny day with no buildings nearby, then your shadow would be quite long. The reason is that there are many people walking about, so there are many objects between you and the sun. These objects block out some of the sunlight that would otherwise reach you, so you need to be far away from the light source in order to see your shadow clearly.
Sunrise and sunset shadows are different because the distance from you to the sun changes as it moves across the sky.
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