Make the given changes in the indicated examples of this section and then find the indicated values.

In Example 2, in line 4, change 58.5° to 62.1° and then find the distance.

Data from Example 2

The Goodyear blimp (now, actually a semi-rigid airship) is 1850 ft above the ground and south of the Rose Bowl in California during a playoff college football game. The angle of depression (the angle between the horizontal and the line of sight, when the object is below the horizontal) of the north goal line from the blimp is 58.5°. How far is the observer in the blimp from the goal line?

Again, we sketch a figure as shown in Fig. 4.40. Here, we let d be the distance between the blimp and the north goal line. From the figure, we see that

In this case, we have rounded off the result to three significant digits, which is the accuracy of the given information.

cos 31.5 1850 d d cos 31.5 = 1850 d || || = 1850 cos 31.5 2170 ft