Much of science, including astronomy, consists of using instruments to describe observations in terms of numbers. A little hands-on experience with the process will show you how it works. Your instruments, the compass rose and the quadrant, have been used in astronomy from the time of the ancient greeks. By using these instruments to observe the position of the Moon each night, you should gain some insight into the reality of the Sun-Earth-Moon system that we discuss in class.
The compass rose, shown at the right, above, is easy to understand. Once you line it up so that it indicates North correctly, you can use it to describe any direction by a number, called the azimuth. The photo at the left shows it in action, weighted against the wind by a few stones.
The quadrant, shown at the right, is used to measure how high above the horizon an object appears. You will need to construct it by printing a high resolution image of a pattern onto card stock and then doing some cutting and folding.
Start this project early. A Preview Submission is due on October 1. That consists of a few Moon observations in the required format and is worth 1 point of extra credit if you do it correctly. If you do it wrong, you will probably still get most of 1 point credit and you will learn how to avoid losing a lot more points on the final submission. If you skip the preview submission entirely, you will lose that entire 1 point of extra credit.
You should have plenty of time to finish the project. The Final Submission is due on November 17. That consists of at least 20 attempts to observe the Moon with at least three of them successful and is worth up to 4 points of extra credit.
Submit the project files through our Blackboard website. Click on the "Projects" button, then the link for either "Project Preview" or "Final Project Report." Projects submitted in other ways will not be graded.
The detailed directions, as well as the high-resolution patterns that you will need to construct your instruments are available from the following links.
Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to read or print these files and is available to download free.Note that you will need to specify the exact location of your observation with both a description and its longitude and latitude. The easiest way to find the the longitude and latitude is to use the website
The preferred format for turning in the project is as a 1997-2003 Microsoft Office compatible spreadsheet. If you are using Office 2007, please use "Save as" to save the file in the 1997-2003 format. If you are not using Microsoft Excel, you should still be able to import and "save as" this format. If you wish to use some other file format, please check with me by email first so that I can see if I can read it.
You can modify the following file, but be sure to keep the order of the columns the same so that I can compare your data with others.
Here is a partially filled out sample spreadsheet with one of the possible things you could add: a graph of the results.