Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, virtually all in-person instruction was shut down across the country in 2020 and beyond. This posed special problems for laboratory-based science courses, as those are defined by the conducting of experiments in person and often with specialized equipment unavailable outside of the classroom. Here I discuss a semester-long project for introductory astronomy that can be performed at home with very basic and inexpensive equipment. And, thanks to the vagaries of the orbits of the planets, variations of this activity can be carried out in many future semesters.
References
1.
C.
Sirola
, “Lunar astrometry
,” Phys. Teach.
59
, 409
(Oct.
2021
).2.
http://astropixels.com/ephemeris/ephemeris.html, accessed Nov. 4, 2021.
3.
Astronomers typically express celestial longitude in “hour angles”—24 hours for a full circle rather than 360°—and each hour angle is naturally subdivided into minutes and seconds.
© 2022 Author(s). Published under an exclusive license by American Association of Physics Teachers.
2022
Author(s)
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