Tolkien and Thorne

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So I'm a fan of Lord of the Rings. I've read the books (except Silmarillion), watched the movies several times, and even play the online game. For a while I've been meaning to observe the night sky in Middle Earth. I stayed up late Saturday night (Sunday morning) to catch a glimpse. Here it is:

The Big Dipper!

A time lapse: you can see the sunrise setting on. Can you see Polaris up top? I couldn't.

My head and the handle aligned

And morning, with the constellations fading out.

But it wouldn't be enough to just use the Big Dipper for a frame of reference. So here's our night sky:

You can see the triad of stars just to the left of the leftmost Ursa Major Star, very similar to the alignment in the Middle Heavens

Also, I thought it'd be really cool to estimate the radius of all Arda (Earth) including Middle Earth an what lay beyond the great sea of Belegaer.

I used sunset as my basis for the experiment, which was very similar to our beach lab. I estimated the height of my horse as 1.5 meters.  I took my first screenshot atop my horse when I could just see the sun rising, at t=0 seconds. I then immediately dismounted and snapped a pic when sun appeared a tad later (the reasoning will be explained in tomorrow's lab write-up) a good 10 seconds later.

Angle = 10/(60.*60*24)

= 0.000115741 degrees
=.000727 radian
Radius = .0015/((1/Cos[.000727]) - 1)
= 5676.13 kilometers

Wow! The radius of our Earth is ~6500 km, and this is surprisingly similar for a snapshot timing.

But Arda isn't just Middle Earth, so I decided to calculate how big Middle Earth alone is. I traveled between Thorin's Gate and Mirkwood, the reaches of the available map, then added some corrections for the yet unavailable areas (Lindon to the northwest and Mordor to the southeast). Overall I traveled around 50 kilometers, so approximately 100km for all Middle Earth including the yet undiscovered areas. This spanned 100 degrees in latitude, covering about 6k*100/360 = 1100 km. Los Angeles is about 2k miles from Miami, and assuming the US and Middle Earth are scaled longitudinally as well, Middle Earth comes out to be about half the area of the US. But that's ignoring Khano and Harad.