Hi all,

I am trying to update the labs in my college-level intro to astronomy course and I am struggling to find suitable solar syatem labs.

The course is a one-semester service course on general astronomy, taken mostly by first-year students who are taking it because they think it is the easiest way to get their lab/science credit, (Then they hit me and find out otherwise!! ) some of whom have such a poor grounding that they do not even know how to use a calculator!!!!

I currently have 2 labs on the solar system. One is making craters, which works very well. The other is the CLEA Mercury Rotation lab, which many really struggle with, so I would like to replace it with something else. Does anyone have any ideas where suitable labs might be found? What sort of labs do others here use?

Thanks in advance.

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Why is it that in a traffic jam the other lane always moves faster?

Can you do timing the moons of Jupiter (with canned data) to determine the diameter of the Earth's orbit, given the speed of light?

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Forming opinions as we speak

Feel free to use some of our materials and/or activities:

http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys236/phys236.html

http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys231/phys231.html

Oh, solar system, nevermind.

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Definitley Thought-Provoking
(my astro-blog/podcast)

If you're doing CLEA labs, two that I've used here include the Transit of Venus lab (finding an AU) and the Moons of Jupiter lab (finding their orbits and Jupiter's mass). I really like the latter, since it shows the students how to use Kepler's third law.