It turns out our "friends" in that overglorified middle school in Lubbock have it wrong, but that comes as a little shock to us Aggies. Their claims that the Will Rogers' horse's butt faces College Station are off...and not by just a little either.
I am a Navigator with the Air Force and I have access to some pretty high-speed software, so I decided to put this claim to the test, since it always struck me as dubious, at best. The claim is that the Horse faces 23 degrees West of North so that the Horse's derrière faces us Aggies. Tceh claims it/presents it as a fact, not a legend: "The statue was physically erected on what was known as Soapsuds Pavilion east Memorial Circle and offset 23 degrees north from west in order to face the rear of the horse toward Texas A&M"
http://www.depts.ttu.edu/studentaffairs/parent2002/information/traditions.pdf
This claim of the angle is pretty easily verified from a google maps satellite photo:
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=33.584502,-101.873651&spn=0.000644,0.00147&t=h&z=20
That would be about 157 degrees (360-23=337 & 337-180=157) as an alleged heading to College Station. Now, I'm not one to quibble about a degree or two here and there, so 23 degrees appears to be about right, though it might be based on Magnetic North versus True North.
http://ask.yahoo.com/20030826.html
In either case, I made a simple measurement from the statue to the middle of Kyle Field's 50 Yard Line (I chose that arbitrary point because it is near the center of campus and is readily identifiable. Being near the center, it gives a good approximation of the school's location). At that distance (333.68687616 Nautical Miles), being off by one degree will put you off course 5.561447936 miles. So, let's give our mathematics-challenged brethren 5 degrees and round up just to give them some range of error with which to work. This would give them a target to hit 56 nautical miles in diameter.
Unfortunately, using the following coordinates:
Horse: 33°35'4"N 101°52'25"W
Center of 50 yard line at Kyle Field: 30°36'36"N 096°20'25"W
the True Course from the horse's patoot to Kyle Field is 121 degrees; a "mere" 36 degrees (or 200 miles!!!) off target. But what about the Magnetic Course, you say? Turns out that measurement (113 degrees) only makes things worse and they are off 44 degrees (or 244 miles).
Other stories about it facing Austin are more plausible, but still quite wrong since that course would be 132 True/125 Magnetic
More info: Learning to use the software is part of my job as a Student Navigator. That I chose something that had some specific meaning is irrelevant. I could just have easily found the distance and angle between any other two points on the face of the earth. I chose this one, but more specifically, this was all part of simply understanding how to use the software. I chose the Lubbock and College Station VORTACs (a VORTAC is a navigational beacon used by aviators for purposes of navigation. There are about 600 of these across the U.S., but they will be phased out in the next 40 years and be replaced by GPS) and found that the heading was nowhere close. That piqued my curiosity. When I got home that night, I used several public websites (on my own time, mind you) to verify my answer and give information that anyone (who has the internet) could verify. I first found the coordinates at http://www.earthtools.org/ and then plugged them into a number of distance calculators. All were within a few degrees/miles (this varies depending on the course used: rhumb line or great circle route, the rounding used to vary the magnetic heading 1-3 degrees while on the route, but averages to be the same heading, even though the line isn't perfectly straight from start to finish. When you take all that into account...
...you know what, I'm not going to rehash everything I've learned in my aviation career. If you have a specific question, please ask, but my measurements are correct.
Because it is near the center of campus. It really doesn't matter what you choose because nothing on the campus is even close.
Another claim makes a little more sense...
Swing and a miss...more BS (or, more appropriately horsesh**) taught to Tceh students by "legend" only loosely related to reality. Like any good myth, it has some elements of truth mixed with a heavy dose of fiction:
1. The term "True West" doesn't exist
2. At the summer solstice (using this year as an example), the sun indeed sets at about 67 degrees from True North (or 23 degrees counterclockwise from "True West"
. This is because the Sun is directly over the Tropic of Cancer. More specifically it is 23.5 degrees from "True West" and, due to the slightly elliptical shape of the Earth (it isn't exactly round), the sunset actually varies from location to location, but easily within a few degrees. I'll concede this point as being close enough.
3. Assuming by "True West" it was meant 90 degrees counterclockwise from True North, the measurements seem to line up with the legend pretty closely (270 degrees + 23 degrees = direction of the head = 293 degrees. Therefore the direction of the tail would be 180 degrees from that direction: 293-180=113. 113 is awfully close to 114, so I'd be happy to give you a degree and count it as quite accurate...
EXCEPT!!!...
...the horse doesn't face even close to that direction. Have you even been to the statue? The grid of roads in Lubbock are a Navigator's dream and are effectively aligned in cardinal directions. Using a simple compass:
...you can easily tell the approximate direction of the statue just by looking at it from a google maps satellite view (note that True North is up). Just zoom out on the provided link to get an idea of the street alignment in Lubbock in relation to the statue.
from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27361018@N08/2546030792/sizes/o/ and http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&lr=lang_en&hl=en&msa=0&msid=107879512465392162424.00044eb330b7eafcae3b9&ll=33.584484,-101.873628&spn=0.000644,0.00147&t=h&z=20
4. As requested: an image of the course from the horse's patoot to Kyle Field. Not even close.
5. For those interested in Magnetic Fields and how they relate to navigation, here's a decent image of the magnetic fields of the Earth over the Northern hemisphere.
In short (too late!) this urban legend is full of more horse**** than Soapsuds ever was.
[This message has been edited by BQZip01 (edited 10/23/2009 3:12a).]
I am a Navigator with the Air Force and I have access to some pretty high-speed software, so I decided to put this claim to the test, since it always struck me as dubious, at best. The claim is that the Horse faces 23 degrees West of North so that the Horse's derrière faces us Aggies. Tceh claims it/presents it as a fact, not a legend: "The statue was physically erected on what was known as Soapsuds Pavilion east Memorial Circle and offset 23 degrees north from west in order to face the rear of the horse toward Texas A&M"
http://www.depts.ttu.edu/studentaffairs/parent2002/information/traditions.pdf
This claim of the angle is pretty easily verified from a google maps satellite photo:
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=33.584502,-101.873651&spn=0.000644,0.00147&t=h&z=20
That would be about 157 degrees (360-23=337 & 337-180=157) as an alleged heading to College Station. Now, I'm not one to quibble about a degree or two here and there, so 23 degrees appears to be about right, though it might be based on Magnetic North versus True North.
http://ask.yahoo.com/20030826.html
In either case, I made a simple measurement from the statue to the middle of Kyle Field's 50 Yard Line (I chose that arbitrary point because it is near the center of campus and is readily identifiable. Being near the center, it gives a good approximation of the school's location). At that distance (333.68687616 Nautical Miles), being off by one degree will put you off course 5.561447936 miles. So, let's give our mathematics-challenged brethren 5 degrees and round up just to give them some range of error with which to work. This would give them a target to hit 56 nautical miles in diameter.
Unfortunately, using the following coordinates:
Horse: 33°35'4"N 101°52'25"W
Center of 50 yard line at Kyle Field: 30°36'36"N 096°20'25"W
the True Course from the horse's patoot to Kyle Field is 121 degrees; a "mere" 36 degrees (or 200 miles!!!) off target. But what about the Magnetic Course, you say? Turns out that measurement (113 degrees) only makes things worse and they are off 44 degrees (or 244 miles).
Other stories about it facing Austin are more plausible, but still quite wrong since that course would be 132 True/125 Magnetic
More info: Learning to use the software is part of my job as a Student Navigator. That I chose something that had some specific meaning is irrelevant. I could just have easily found the distance and angle between any other two points on the face of the earth. I chose this one, but more specifically, this was all part of simply understanding how to use the software. I chose the Lubbock and College Station VORTACs (a VORTAC is a navigational beacon used by aviators for purposes of navigation. There are about 600 of these across the U.S., but they will be phased out in the next 40 years and be replaced by GPS) and found that the heading was nowhere close. That piqued my curiosity. When I got home that night, I used several public websites (on my own time, mind you) to verify my answer and give information that anyone (who has the internet) could verify. I first found the coordinates at http://www.earthtools.org/ and then plugged them into a number of distance calculators. All were within a few degrees/miles (this varies depending on the course used: rhumb line or great circle route, the rounding used to vary the magnetic heading 1-3 degrees while on the route, but averages to be the same heading, even though the line isn't perfectly straight from start to finish. When you take all that into account...
...you know what, I'm not going to rehash everything I've learned in my aviation career. If you have a specific question, please ask, but my measurements are correct.
quote:
For arguments sake, let's hypothetically assume that Texas Tech did in fact order the horse's arse pointed directly at Texas A&M. Why choose the 50 yard line at Kyle Field?
Because it is near the center of campus. It really doesn't matter what you choose because nothing on the campus is even close.
Another claim makes a little more sense...
quote:
Will Rogers and Soapsuds were originally slated to point due West to coincide with the title of the piece "Into the sunset",but since the folks in downtown Lubbock didn't want the butt of Soapsuds pointed at them. At the summer solstice, the sun sets 23 degrees north of true west, so that's where they pointed Will.
Swing and a miss...more BS (or, more appropriately horsesh**) taught to Tceh students by "legend" only loosely related to reality. Like any good myth, it has some elements of truth mixed with a heavy dose of fiction:
1. The term "True West" doesn't exist
2. At the summer solstice (using this year as an example), the sun indeed sets at about 67 degrees from True North (or 23 degrees counterclockwise from "True West"
. This is because the Sun is directly over the Tropic of Cancer. More specifically it is 23.5 degrees from "True West" and, due to the slightly elliptical shape of the Earth (it isn't exactly round), the sunset actually varies from location to location, but easily within a few degrees. I'll concede this point as being close enough. 3. Assuming by "True West" it was meant 90 degrees counterclockwise from True North, the measurements seem to line up with the legend pretty closely (270 degrees + 23 degrees = direction of the head = 293 degrees. Therefore the direction of the tail would be 180 degrees from that direction: 293-180=113. 113 is awfully close to 114, so I'd be happy to give you a degree and count it as quite accurate...
EXCEPT!!!...
...the horse doesn't face even close to that direction. Have you even been to the statue? The grid of roads in Lubbock are a Navigator's dream and are effectively aligned in cardinal directions. Using a simple compass:
...you can easily tell the approximate direction of the statue just by looking at it from a google maps satellite view (note that True North is up). Just zoom out on the provided link to get an idea of the street alignment in Lubbock in relation to the statue.
from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27361018@N08/2546030792/sizes/o/ and http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&lr=lang_en&hl=en&msa=0&msid=107879512465392162424.00044eb330b7eafcae3b9&ll=33.584484,-101.873628&spn=0.000644,0.00147&t=h&z=20
4. As requested: an image of the course from the horse's patoot to Kyle Field. Not even close.
5. For those interested in Magnetic Fields and how they relate to navigation, here's a decent image of the magnetic fields of the Earth over the Northern hemisphere.
In short (too late!) this urban legend is full of more horse**** than Soapsuds ever was.
[This message has been edited by BQZip01 (edited 10/23/2009 3:12a).]
