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| Laboratory and Field | Lab / Field 01: Space, Matter and Old Light |
| Our first field trips cannot yet be taken due to limitations of transportation and the small issue of the short three-month length of the semester. Even travelling at the speed of light, this field trip would require millions of years to complete. In this exercise you will investigate the diversity of seen and unseen objects and phenomena of Universe. Much of what you will see in photographs happened from eight minutes to millions of years ago and you are seeing "old light" that has travelled to us at 186,282 miles per second (about 670 million miles per hour). Our nearest star, Sol, is about 93 million miles away and sunlight light takes about 8 minutes 12 second to reach us. The most distant stars are in a galaxy estimated to be 13 billion light years away . . that's 76,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away. Images from distant reaches of Universe and nearby objects of our solar system have been pictured every day since 16 June 1995 on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day website. This week's lab will begin an excursion through Universe to discover its dimensions, composition, texture and phenomena and how these affect Earth. Your field locations will, in reality, be various websites and your imagination. 
Lab / Field Assignment 01 1. Visit NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day website. Browse the images by either the back and forward tabs below each image or by going to the archive and selecting different titles and dates. Become familiar with what is available. Astronomy Picture of the Day: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ Archive: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html Images grouped by subject: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/lib/aptree.html 2. Navigate to the APOD "Search" page. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/apod/apod_search The search page allows simple text searches but also simple "and / or" searches *. If you want to see all references which include only information about neutron stars, you need to place quotes around the phrase like this "neutron star" typing simply, neutron star, will get you a much longer list of all references to neutrons, stars and neutron stars. If you want to restrict your search to only those references with both "neutron star" (99 items found) and "supernova explosion" (68 items found), place the word and between the two phrases like this: "neutron star" and "supernova explosion" (21 items found) Search the following words and phrases. Compile information and examples from the APOD site and use this compilation to write descriptions of each of the objects or phenomena listed below. For each description, provide a list of APOD dates from which your examples and information were obtained. a. Binary Stars b. Black Holes c. Neutron Star d. White Dwarf e. Red Giant f. Planetary Nebula g. Supernova h. Dark Matter i. Globular Cluster j. Spiral Galaxy k. Gravitational Lens 3. Laboratory Report Due Monday 8 February. 10 points. Email your report to: natureport@gmail.com The subject line of the email will be "Lab 01: Your Last Name" Email your report with the descriptions of each of the objects or phenomena (a-k above). With each description, list the supporting APOD date(s) you used in formulating your description. |
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