Retired Physics Curriculum: Astronomy
This was one of my favorite units of the year, if not the favorite. I always tried to show where ideas came from and how physics concepts developed. I saw this unit as showing where physics itself came from through the development of models of the solar system. This is not in any textbook, so I eventually made the website Historical Astronomy to cover most of the ideas so that the kids had another resource. There is a lot of history in this unit, which basically starts with the Ancient Greeks and ends with Kepler and Galileo.
When Bradford started teaching the AP class with me, I somehow convinced him to go along and do this unit. Maybe it helped that I was Department Head at the time.
This unit is not part of the official AP curriculum, and is not on the AP test.
Objectives, reading, homework and equations for the unit.
My website that acts as the reading material for the unit.
This a PDF version of a Powerpoint that I made. It's the only unit where I really used a lot of powerpoint, and it did make it easier to quickly hit the highlights of what was going on.
While staying at their lab tables, the kids need to figure out the distance to an oobject in the middle/front of the room. A long time ago, I would take the kids outside and they had to determine the distance to a utlity pole while staying behind a fence.
There's always someone who doesn't know this.
Finding the position of the sun or the north star on some key dates.
Some problems on parallax and the basic Greek geometric ideas.
This is a small manuscript written by Copernicus, aboouot 30 years before his full text is finally published. It describes the highlights of what he did and why. Most of the ideas are presented in the first two pages.
The original Latin for the handful of kids taking Latin.
I usually had the kids read this in class and answer the questions in their lab group. I liked to point out that they were reading a 500 year old primary source in their science class.
How does one figure out the time it takes a planet to go around the sun, when we are on a moving earth?
This was an activity to (hopefully) get the kids to understand the debate between the geocentric and heliocentric models.
Kepler first figured out the orbit of the earth, and this is a lab modeled after his method. The orbit is triangulated and drawn on a piece of paper. I used to have the kids use the orbit they make in this lab as the start of the next lab, but settled on keeping them separate. If they make a bad orbit here, then the next lab is a disaster.
Use this for the earth orbit lab.
Kepler then figured out the orbit of Mars, and this lab models that. Again, it is drawn on a piece of paper.
Use this for the mars orbit lab.
Just a handout with the key ellipse stuff.
Just a handout with some key definitions.
Simpler problems with Keplers' Laws.
These problems involve details of orbits and periods.
I used to have the kids read Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius. I think this is one of the most important and easy to read science books ever written. These were the big ideas I wanted them to get out of the book. And this is a 400 year old primary source being read in a science class.
Years ago, we had an astronomy program called Voyager and this was a lab for the kids to observe a lot of the key ideas. I never looked for an online replacement (which do exist) and just lectured with some pictures. Honestly, I don't know how much they got of doing the lab, but it was an attempt.
I tried a couple times to just have the kids read things from the website and so these were the key questions they were supposed to answer.
page last updated 6/21/23 by david mcclung, copyright 2023, all rights reserved.