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	FirstLight's First Ten Years
	29°39' N,  82°21' W Altitude: 50 Meters (more or less)		Updated June 18, 2004
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Where Are We? — A History of the AAC Logo

by Howard L. Cohen
The AAC logo includes the terrestrial coordinates of the club's home location.
But precisely what place is this? Find the answer and win a prize!

Have you ever noticed the numbers that appear below the Alachua Astronomy Club logo on the first page of FirstLight? This set of numbers (29°39' N, 82°21' W) represent the latitude and longitude of the club's home in North Florida. In fact, the AAC logo shows our location (Alachua County) using a map of Florida and a symbolic telescope pointing at Gainesville, indicated by a "star or sun symbol" on the map.

Latitude represents how far a place is north or south of the Earth's equator. The number 29°39' N gives a location 29 degrees and 39 arc minutes north of the equator. (An arc minute is a 1/60 of a degree.) Look on a map and you will find this is almost the same latitude as Houston, Texas or New Orleans, Louisiana. (All of California lies north of our latitude!) Other locations with approximately similar latitudes include Cairo (Egypt), New Delhi (India) and even Mt. Everest! And a major city with an identical latitude is Chongquing (Chungking) in China, capital of Nationalist China during World War II.

The second set of numbers, 82°21' W, represents a point 82 degrees and 21 minutes west of the Greenwich meridian. This puts Gainesville 29.4 minutes of time west of the center of the Eastern Time Zone, almost enough to place Gainesville in the Central Time Zone (ignoring local variations in time zone borders)! Although we think of Gainesville as an "East Coast City," Gainesville is really more "Midwestern." Indeed, Gainesville has nearly the same longitude as Columbus, Ohio and Detroit, Michigan. In addition, if you travel due south from Gainesville, your path will first cross western Panama and then pass into the Pacific Ocean without ever crossing South America! (A south-drawn line just misses the west coast of Peru.) Thus, all of South America lies east of Gainesville and south of the North Atlantic Ocean.

The AAC logo has appeared on the FirstLight cover ever since the first issue was first created and published by Chuck Broward in December 1987.* (Chuck currently serves as club publicity person.) The original logo contained a crude representation of Florida with an outline of a Newtonian reflector on a German equatorial mount positioned over North Florida. The drawing also included lines radiating outward across the state from Gainesville's location. Latitude and longitude were not originally a part of the newsletter cover. Latitude and longitude first appeared in the newsletter heading for the September 1992 issue except that the latitude given was 29°38' N, or one arc minute less that the value in this newsletter (more on this later). However, the March and April 1993 issues eliminated most of the newsletter's heading including the latitude and longitude. (I don't know why.) The heading and coordinates reappeared with the May 1993 issue but now the words "more or less"in parentheses followed the longitude.

A redesigned logo appeared in the January 1994 issue of FirstLight. The map of Florida was more precisely drawn and colored black. However, the black background rendered the telescope almost invisible. Latitude and longitude continued to appear at the bottom of the newsletter heading, again with the words "more or less" in parentheses.

I assumed the editorship of FirstLight for the February 1994 issue and redesigned the header and logo using more advanced computer hardware and software. (This header and logo continue almost unchanged through this issue of FirstLight except that the current editor, Pam Mydock, has interchanged the positions of the logo and header.) The redesigned logo uses a rectangle and equilateral triangle to symbolize a Dobsonian telescope. I also chose a font (Tricorne Display) for the newsletter name, FirstLight, to compliment the rectangle and triangle motif.

Finally, I placed the latitude and longitude coordinates below the logo (omitting the words "more or less") to emphasize the club's location. However, because of a typographical error, the latitude printed on the February cover appeared as 29°29' rather than 29°38'. This location would have placed the AAC's home more than ten miles south of Gainesville, in Ledwith Lake southwest of Micanopy!

I corrected this error in the next issue and the value 29°39' has continued unchanged since then. However, I increased the number of arc minutes to 39 from 38, believing this value better represented Gainesville's location. I do not know where Chuck got the original coordinates. However, the old coordinates appear to represent the position of an old, University of Florida observatory which no longer exists.

But where on Earth (no pun intended!) is 29°39' N, 82°21' W? What actual place is this? Figure it out! Assuming the arc minute values are exact (e.g., 39' is 39.00 and 21' is 21.00 arc minutes), find and identify this location using a street address, or number of feet and direction from some well a known landmark (e.g., University and Main, Tigert Hall, etc.), or whatever else is appropriate.

Mail your entry to the author at 1501 NW 28 Street, Gainesville, FL 32605-5037. (E-mail entries not allowed since not everyone has internet access.) In addition, only currently paid-up members of the AAC are eligible. The editors and publishers of FirstLight are disqualified. (Relatives of the author are also disqualified—my wife already knows the answer!) I will use the named locality closest to these coordinates to judge the winner and I will be the sole judge of the winning entry. (The winning location should lie within a few hundred feet of the correct place.)

Please include your name, address, telephone number, and date of entry with your answer. Also write a short description (a sentence or two) about how you determined your answer. Guessing is allowed! In case of a tie, earliest postmark wins. (If postmarks are identical, I will judge the winner based on how you found your answer.) Entries must be postmarked by June 30, 1998.

The prize? A more-or-less current copy of a general, introductory astronomy textbook! (Current astronomy textbooks sell for about forty dollars or more.) We will announce the winner and answer in the September issue of FirstLight. I will also award the prize at the September AAC meeting.

Added Note:

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*The club first met in September 1987 to organize. The second meeting, on October 13, in room 125 of the Doyle Conner Building, featured talks by the author ("The Telescope Trap") and University of Florida astronomy graduate student Billy Cooke ("The Stars and Planets in the Winter Sky").Charlie Tarjan published an announcement of the second meeting on September 21.By December, Chuck Broward initiated FirstLight and the original AAC logo.

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