 Greetings and welcome to my astronomy and physical science classes. In this video, I am going to go over the basic instructions for the Solar Observation Project that you will be doing for this class. This is a semester long project, you do need to start on it at the beginning of class. You cannot just wait until the end of the semester and expect to do well on it. And essentially what we are going to do is watch the sun over the course of the semester and measure its motions. And we can do that by measuring the shadows. So there is some introductory material here that you will want to look at. And that I am not going to go through and read again. But we can also, what we want to look at is what you really need to do. And what we are going to be doing is making these altitude measurements. So we are going to start here and look at the altitude measurements. And this is what you need to do. And so what you are needing is to look at a specific time. And that is local noon. Which for this area is generally around 12.15 Eastern Standard Time. Or 1.15 Eastern Daylight Time. So that would mean you would want to make these observations at 12.15 in the winter. And at 1.15 in the summer months. And I will let you know during the semester when these change. Essentially when we set the clocks back for daylight savings time. That adjusts our clock but it does not change what the sun is doing. What we need is a specific object. A solid object is shown in the picture here. So you have some kind of pole going up. And what you are going to measure is how tall that pole is, the height. And you are going to measure the length of the shadow that it casts at that time. And record those two numbers. And really that is what you need to do right now. Put an object out in the sun. What kind of object should it be? A box is a very good object. Because it casts a very, if we use the sun up here. It casts a very nice clear shadow straight back behind it that you can then measure. You can also use things like cans. They are a little bit harder because they are rounded objects. But you can still use those. They will cast and you do want to measure from the very back portion here only to the tip of the shadow. You don't want to measure any of the shadow along the edge of the can. You don't want to do that. That will cause you to overestimate the shadow length. So you could use those types of objects. And all you need to record for right now is the height of the object and the length of the shadow. And I will show you that in the data table in just a minute. I show some of the calculations here. Don't worry about this for right now. We will come back to this later in the semester. And I will give you far more details for that. If you are really up into the math and you can go through and work on these if you choose. But I will give you far more instructions and tell you exactly what to do later on. What I really wanted to show you here is again this is all the information on the calculations. Then there are some sample questions here. You will want to come back to these at the end of the semester. Those are required to be answered as part of your write up. I give them to you now so you have time to think about this. I will talk about some of these over the semester and other ones you may have to look up yourself. I give you some general comments and expectations. Read through those for what I am looking for. The big thing to look at is my write up information here. And that is because this gives you all the details. Every section that I am looking for in your final write up. Again I will give you that now. I will give it to you again at the end of the semester so you can figure out what you need to do for this. But it gives you some basics and what you really want to look at right now is the requirements for the data. The rest of it you can look at later. But I asked that there be two days, two full days between each observation. So if an observation is made on February 1st, skip two full days and then make one on February 4th. So you would have to have two full days between those observations. I only count up to four observations each month. So if you wait until the end of the semester and make ten observations in the last month of the semester, you will only get credit for four of them. So you will not get any additional credit for those. You are always welcome to make more. But that is the requirement that you need to do. They need to extend over at least ten weeks. So, again, you need to start on this early to be able to fit that into the term. The idea is to get you started early. There are some limitations for that. If you are taking this in a twelve week class or a six week class or even a four week class, there are some different expectations for how long they have to last and for how many observations you have to make. I expect ten for a full semester class. That would be a little bit lower for the shorter classes, certainly. So I give you some of those numbers just to look at so you kind of look at what you have to get. And I give you the numbers here that a twelve week class should get eight, a six week class at least five, and a four week class get at least three observations. So you know how many observations you are expected to get. And again, you can look at the rest, but the rest of it does not matter until the end of the semester. And then finally, I have a data table here that you can use. You can make your own on Excel. That's fine. You will be submitting this three times during the course of the semester. And all you need to do at this point is fill out the first five columns right here. That's all you need to record. Your date, so if you're making this on April the 17th, you'd put that date there. That would be after daylight saving time, so you might be making it around 1.12 p.m., say, record that as accurately as possible. What were the sky conditions? Maybe clear. If it was completely cloudy and you couldn't see a shadow, don't record an observation. It's not going to help you. How tall was your object? Maybe 20 centimeters exactly. And your shadow length at that point might have been, let's say 20. No, let's not. Let's go back and say your shadow length at that point would probably be something maybe like 15 centimeters. But say 15.1 centimeters. And that would be what you'd record and you're done. You do not need to worry about these for right now. We will do those later in the semester. Then you just want to record those over the course of the semester. What units you use does not matter, as long as you measure both of these in the same unit. So if you have an inch ruler and that's all you've got, that's perfectly fine, an inch measuring tape. Just measure them in inches. Don't do any conversions. You just want to measure them in the same set of units. So that's really all you're doing. All you need to do right now is work on this data table and get that started as early as possible. The expectations are generally for about one observation every week to 10 days. So that's usually enough time so that you're not trying to observe this every day because of course people have busy work schedules and school schedules. So you're not trying to do this every single day just as you can over the course of the semester. Set yourself some kind of reminder so that you can try to keep on track with this project. And again, at three points during the semester you will turn in a copy of this data sheet and I will take a look at that to make sure you're on the right track, try to keep you going with the project and to make sure you're on the right track with it. So that concludes this video discussing the solar observing project, the semester long project that you will be doing in this class. And there will be plenty of other videos explaining other projects. So until next time, have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.