Sidereal Day Project You will need: ? A watch or clock, accurately set to the nearest second. ? Ordinary graph paper ? A straight edge ? A notebook for recording your observations. There is no separate Results sheetthe write-up describes what you should include in reporting your results. Purpose You will measure the time difference between the solar and sidereal days. Why? The project will provide experience in experiment design, observation, analysis and modeling that has many elements of real-world science.Document Preview:Sidereal Day Project You will need: ? A watch or clock, accurately set to the nearest second. ? Ordinary graph paper ? A straight edge ? A notebook for recording your observations. There is no separate Results sheetthe write-up describes what you should include in reporting your results. Purpose You will measure the time difference between the solar and sidereal days. Why? The project will provide experience in experiment design, observation, analysis and modeling that has many elements of real-world science. Some Background If you were asked to define one hour, could you do it? Probably you would say something like, One hour is 1/24th of a day, and you would be right. But what is a day? That is a tougher question. Roughly, it is the time between successive sunsets (or sunrises). This is not precisely correct but will do for our purposes. The time given by your wristwatch is called solar time because it is related to the motion of the Sun. In addition to solar time, astronomers also use sidereal time, a slightly different kind of time thats related to the motion of the stars. A sidereal day is the time between successive starsets, and a sidereal hour is 1/24th of that, and so forth for sidereal minutes and seconds. Now, if the Sun and stars moved together as they rise and set, these two kinds of time would be the same, but they dont. The Sun moves among the stars, taking one full year to make a complete circuit and arriving back at the starting point. Consequently, there is a difference between the solar and sidereal days (and, of course, between solar and sidereal hours, minutes and seconds). In this project you will measure the difference between the lengths of these two kinds of days. What you will do You can, of course, discuss the procedure you plan to use with other class members but each person will do his or her own observations individually. If you lived on the west coast, you could watch a bright star set on Attachments: Sidereal-Day..docx
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