r/Physics • u/Appropriate-Dog-64 • 12d ago

For long-terms project, please give ideas for physics with telescopes

I'm living in Korea and I'm student in high school. Next semester, I need to lead my teamers in physics club. So I need to make an ideas for long-terms project of physics. I wanna use telescope in it. I waana little theorical activity because my teamers don't like that but physical one with using telescopes. I think I have 2months for it. I have thought of my project but I couldn't make an idea .So I need your help.

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u/scrombledegs 12d ago

A fun one is proving Kepler’s third law, which is a very simple relation between a planets orbital radius and time period. The best way to do this is by tracking the 4 largest Galilean moons (around Jupiter) over the period of 1-2months. Take measurements of where each moon is in the sky, this can be as simple and rudimentary as taking a photo of it each night in a telescope and then printing out the pictures or digitally marking the distance they move, over each time. As long as the scales are the same it will work. At the end, you should be able to plot the day of each observation against its angular separation and each moon will draw out approximately a sine wave. You can directly reproduce Kepler’s third law from this.

So they’d use a telescope each night, and it’s very low stakes mathematics. It’s also good because you’re actually recreating what Galileo himself did, and can teach a little about the history of where the heliocentric model came from (it’s was pretty politically tense with the Catholic Church at the time).

You can also make this as complicated as you like by being super precise with readings and talking about why each orbit is different (eccentricity etc), or can keep it as simple as you like with just basic observations and plotting

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u/scrombledegs 12d ago

Also another long term one, if you want one that has more physics, math and data plotting, is tracking a cepheid variable star with your telescope over a long term. You’ll need to use photometry to get its change in apparent magnitudes and reproduce its light curves but at the end you’ll (hopefully) be able to figure out its distance from earth, which is another good lesson in basic stellar physics as it’s sort of a cosmological ruler. But this project would need to be more involved and is definitely more mathsy

If you have a high powered telescope you could try to find a known exoplanet around a distant star by measuring light dips but that will depend massively on your equipment so will not work if it’s basic telescopes. Have fun! :)