AstronomyTeacher

Today you should prepare notes for your open notes test. I would like for you to prepare Jeapordy-style questions for your review activity.

Working in groups of 5, please prepare questions in the following categories:

The Sun
The Moon
Kepler's Laws and Ellipses
The Solar System
Experiments and Science

Each category should have 5 questions at the $100,200,300,400,and 500 dollar level.

This means you will prepare 25 questions, or five each. Identify each question with the name of the person who wrote it.
You can split the work up any way you like, as long as each person writes 5 questions.
Questions should be written Jeapordy style, with answers demanding questions, or as multiple choice.

You can then present the game to another group and play to help review. Turn in the game questions when you are finished.


After this activity, Ms. Poole will assign this extra credit homework, which you can begin in class, and you should bring back to class on Wednesday.

Intrepid explorer Spaceman Spiff finds himself marooned on a planet far from earth. Like Tom Hanks in "Castaway," he begins to assemble clues to indicate where he is in the universe. If he sends off a distress signal with an accurate description of the planet, the Space Patrol can find him again.

Here are the clues Spiff has to work with:
1. Stars in the planet's night sky seem to rotate around a star called Poleaxe, which doesn't move and is 40 degrees above the horizon.
2. After having been marooned for many months, Spiff notes that it takes the planet's sun 298 days to return to the same position on the horizon at sunrise.
3. The planet's sun is identical to our sun.
4. Using a stick in the ground and observing it's shadow, Spiff notes that the maximum altitude of the sun is 60 degrees at noon and the minimum is 40 degrees at noon.
5. Looking at the stars, Spiff notes that the Milky Way is all on one side of the sky. In the other direction, there are very very few stars to see. The sky is blank.
6. Spiff's new home has a moon, which orbits the planet in 12 days. Through geometry and triangulation, Spiff determines that the moon is in a circular orbit with is 100,000,000 meters from the planet.
7. Spiff sees a lunar eclipse and notes the diameter of the shadow of his planet indicates that it has a radius of 15,000 km.
8. Spiff's planet has oceans, which experience tides.
9. Spiff notes three other planets he can see with his eyes. One of them never seems to wander far from the sun. Another one does a curious loop against the stars every couple of planet years. One of them moves so slowly it's hard to tell if it is a planet.


Given these clues, compose a description of Spiff's World for his rescue message.
A. What does Spiff's solar system look like?
B. What are the orbital characteristics of Spiff's World? (orbital period, semimajor axis, axial tilt.)
C. What are the physical characteristics of Spiff's World? (mass of the planet, density)
D. What is it like where Spiff is located? (What is his latitude? How often do tides occur?)