Hello,

i'm a high school student and i'm soon going to work on a personal project during around half a year (which is working besides school itself + one full week). Everyone has to write and present such a piece of work before being allowed to do the final high school exams (i'm from Europe.. don't know if it's the same in the US). No matter what subject one chooses, there MUST be a "pracitcal" thing about it, that means we mustn't just summarize infos i've found in books (that can be done too but additionally there must be something we really do on our own).

For me it was soon clear that the practical part was to be something with programming (because I finally need to learn it properly anyway.. i have basic C++ knowledge). So now I just need a subject for which I can make a little piece of software and also a subject that is interesting to present and write about.

I personally am interested in astronomy but i'm not experienced in it. Now I wanted to ask WHAT kind of astronomy topic you would suggest to work on? I've been thinking about Black Holes for a while but i don't think there's any kind of program I could do with that.. since you all are so much more experienced i have come here to seek your help on this

Any topic suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated!

By the way my main subjects are maths and physics and the teacher who will most probably assist my work has studied maths, physics and astronomy (so there's someone experienced helping me out)

thanks a lot!

I don't know about a specific topic, but there's an increasing quantity of survery results available online for anyone who wants to number-crunch them, such as the recently completed 2MASS survey. Perhaps you could come up with something using that: distribution of quasars or somesuch. (I'm sure there are pros on this board who can come up with much better suggestions than mine.)

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

You could make computer simulations. OOP is great for such tasks. Themes: orbital motions, exploding stars, rotating galaxies, 3D simulations, and so on.

[edited to fix it]

You can go a little deeper with teh motions of planets and maybe simulate the orbits of jupiters moons or orbits of asteriods or comets. The short period comets seem to be more interesting in terms of orbits and orientation to the ecliptic.

Or you can find a cool differnt way to shown how Prof. Newtons laws of motion affect bodies in space or how bodies in space are affected by gravity. Though that might be getting to detailed in terms of gravitational forces. But since you said you were interested in balck holes you can simulate how gravity affects light.

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"The big yellow one's the Sun!!!!"

Or computer games.

As an example, a while back we played aroung with one that simulates what would happen if a Rogue Star entered the solar system on this page .

Whatever you decide to work on, I hope you do well. And thanks for asking!

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"As I lay beneath the Southern Cross, the stars tell more than I could" . . . David Meece

I don't know what Reptile thinks, but I must say, you guys came up with some great ideas. I'm impressed.

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The real news, including science news corporations may not allow on stations they own. http://www.democracynow.org/

thanks everyone!

You have to tell us what you decide!

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Just thgouth of another one. You can build a database of the stars positions in teh celestial sphere and from that database creat a 3 deminsiol representation of the database. And then add apparent motions and such But that might be getting way too complicated. But it coul dbe fun.

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"The big yellow one's the Sun!!!!"

not decided yet

What if you plotted Hertzprung-Russell diagrams for individual open clusters using data available from the on-line catalogs and databases. I don't know what graphing programs you have access to, but it would definitely be possible in Excel. Not as exciting as computer simulations, but practical. You could show your class how cluster H-R diagrams evolve as clusters age.

There is both a lunar and solar eclipse coming up in May. You could run a program predicting the eclipses, and your classmates could then go out and see something tangible to go along with your report.

Of course, there are already programs to do this, but you could add a creative twist to it. Maybe adding the question, if everything stayed the same with the sun and the solar system (no future nova, for example,) how far into the future would you have to go in order to see a full solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse from the viewpoint of your location?