Posts Tagged ‘astronomy’
Very simply, parallax is an apparent motion of an object due to a change in observation position. Let me start with an example. Here are two photos. I took a picture of the cabinet in the background from two slightly different positions. In the foreground is a clone trooper that did [...]
Yes, this can be very complicated. But what should a middle-school student understand about light? You see stuff in textbooks that is either wrong or just a bunch of disconnected factoids (I like the word factoid). So, what do I think is important about light (not at the Maxwell’s equations level)
What is [...]
I love this question:
Why is it warmer in the summer than in the winter (for the Northern hemisphere)?
Go ahead and ask your friends. I suppose they will give one of the following likely answers:
The tilt of the Earth The tilt of the Earth makes us closer to the Sun [...]
Some time ago, I wrote about the awesome things the Greeks did in astronomy. Basically they calculated the size of the Earth, distance and size of the moon and distance and size of the sun. The value obtained for the distance to the sun was a bit off, but still a bang up job if you ask me. (where bang-up is meant as a good thing) If the greeks were in my introductory physics lab, they would need to include uncertainties with their measurements. What would the uncertainty in the final value look like?
Question: When is the Sun directly overhead? (assume you are in the United States of America)
One of things I like to think about in science is “how do we know that?” It is interesting how one thing builds on another. This is a story of how the Greeks estimated the distance from the Earth to the Sun (an important idea in the development of the model of the solar [...]