A Note on Professor Hector Munera's Paraconical Pendulum Observations in Bogota, Colombia

Along with his colleague Professor Arenas, Professor Hector Munera conducted observations from April 1 through April 13 with his two paraconical pendulums in Bogota, Colombia. Photos of the first versions of these pendulums can be seen in the lower part of this page in the blog we made during setup; however, since thOse photos were taken, Prof. Munera reinforced the frameworks considerably with many cross members, and on the day of the eclipse they looked like this:



And here is a shot of Professor Arenas operating the pendulum:



You may ask, why the candles? well, they were anticipating the chance of a power failure...

For pendulum #1 (swinging at azimuth 45o), the team obtained the precession curves shown in this chart:



A single gathering together of these curves at 17:00 is clearly apparent, with essentially zero precession value. (The Foucault effect is very small at the latitude of Bogota.) This means that, at 17:00 on all these thirteen days, this pendulum P1 was essentially undisturbed and had very little precession.

This behavior cannot be accidental, and its validity is reinforced by the fact that it was not noticed while the observations were being conducted; it has only come to light upon subsequent analysis.

As commented in the section dealing with the Panama results, a similar bunching together of the graphs for both the pendulums in Penonome, Panama, 800 km away from Bogota, was seen at the same time.

Therefore, Prof. Munera and I therefore have succeeded in demonstrating, for the first time ever, correlated anomalous behavior over the same time period for paraconical pendulums separated by hundreds of kilometers. This is something worth boasting about.

For completeness, we give Professor Munera's results for his pendulum #2 (swinging at azimuth 135o). This pendulum behaved very erratically at all times, and both Prof. Munera and we suspect some structural fault or mis-alignment. The precession amounts have been divided by 5, to bring them to a similar scale as that of the other pendulums.



No particular clustering is visible. No clear conclusions can be drawn from the overall behavior of this pendulum.


Was there an eclipse effect?


The chart for the pendulums in Colombia on 8 April is shown here:



Both the pendulums show a similar small deviation, and this is somewhat suggestive of a possible weak effect due to the eclipse. But the pendulums show larger deviations at other times, so we think that it would not be realistic to assert that any eclipse effect has definitely appeared.


Professor Munera is continuing his investigations.

-o0o-


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