Jupiter And Arcturus Lab Report

As the data suggests (assuming no errors were made during the measurement process), the angular separation between Jupiter and Spica grew slowly from 10 degrees to 11 degrees (approximate numbers), then shrank back down to 10 degrees towards the end of the semester. However, the angular separation between Jupiter and Arcturus seems to increase over the course of the summer and did not make a return (at least dramatic enough to be noticed like Jupiter and Spica) to its original separation (consulting the Starry Night software after the experiment confirms that the angular separation between Jupiter and Arcturus was indeed slowly decreases).

Question 12: Over the course of the summer, Jupiter was getting dimmer. This can be attributed to the

The twinkling of stars, known as astronomical scintillation, is due to Earth's atmosphere. Since all stars are many light-years away, their light takes a long time to travel to Earth and they themselves appear as small pin-point. As a result, as each individual light ray reaches Earth, our planet's atmosphere refracts the rays through its various layers of different temperatures and densities, similar to dropping a coin into a pool to see a distorted image. As such, an observer can imagine that light from distant stars travel through a single zig zag path once they pierce through the atmosphere, rather than travelling in a straight line as it would if the atmosphere did not exist (or if the observer was in space). On the other hand, planets, such as Jupiter, do not twinkle in the same manner since they're much closer to Earth and therefore appear to be a lot larger than the stars. Therefore, although rays from each side of the planet are indeed refracted, they end up cancelling each other out, and thus do not twinkle like stars do. In other words, rather than a small pin point of light reaching the atmosphere (as is the case with stars), many light beams that are much wider than stars come from planets, which results in the refraction being averaged out between the