Intro to Astronomy Assignment

BEFORE YOU BEGIN - This is important for all of the labs. Create a new document for your responses with the following naming convention:

Lastname_Firstname_HDF_Lab.doc.

For example, Smith_John_HDF_Lab.doc.

Type your responses into your blank document, being careful to include headings for the six sections of the lab (Phase I through Phase VI) and any question numbers. To submit your assignment, upload this document plus any additional documents you may have, such as a scan or photograph of your sketches for phase II (or you can paste those directly into your document). All submitted labs will be automatically scanned by the anti-plagiarism Turnitin.com.

Phase I—You will be guided through exploring the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image at  www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0406a/ . First, read the text on that page to get a feel for what you're looking at. This is an amazing image! Then, click once on the image to enlarge it before answering the four questions in the lab. Enter your answers directly in the Word document. 

Phase II—You will now use an interactive version of this same image, located at  www.aip.de/groups/galaxies/sw/udf/swudfV1.0.html . Read the instructions in the lab to learn how to use this. You will be asked to make some rough sketches and to answer a question. For the sketches, you may either use a computer program to sketch, or you may do it by hand and then scan/photograph it to upload (if you do this method, you can just insert the scan or photograph directly into the Word document). You can also upload your lab as a PDF, if you prefer.

Phase III—You are given some data collected from the image, and asked to come up with a conclusion based on that data (in other words, an evidence-based conclusion). Don't use outside information. Base your conclusion only on what you see in front of you.

Phase IV—In this phase, you are given a research question and asked to come up with a step-by-step method of collecting the evidence needed to answer this question. You do not need to do the data collection process, but you do need to explain what someone would need to do (again, further instructions are in the lab document). Make sure that your instructions are step-by-step, so that someone else could take your instructions and be guided through exactly what they would need to do ( using the same Hubble Ultra Deep Field image ) to answer this research question.

Phase V—Now, based on what you have done in the first four phases, you will come up with your own answerable research question that can be answered using this image. Don't worry, the question does not need to be complex or sophisticated, but it does need to be answerable, by you, using this image. Do not try to ask a question that you can't answer using this image. You will write your question, the procedure to collect the evidence (like in phase IV), collect the data (use the data table phase III as a rough guide), and come to an evidence-based conclusion (like you did in phase III). Your question must be on the topic of the lab. That means that in this first lab, your question must be about some characteristic(s) of galaxies introduced in this lab (color, shape, distance). In future week's labs, the topics for phase V will be different, and will be provided in the lab.

I will be asking you to come up with a research question in almost every lab in this course. This is the hardest part of the exercise for a lot of students!

Most labs in college science classes have traditionally told you what question to answer in lab and do not provide lot of opportunity to ask your own questions in a scientific way. I am really interested in having my students learn to ask good questions, so here are some tips:

1) Your question in phase V must be different from those in the earlier parts of the lab, which are provided to give you good examples. Your question must also be on the same topic as the lab. For example, if the lab is about the motion and position of the Sun (lab 2), then your question must be about some motion or position of the Sun. In lab 1, the topic of the lab is characteristics of galaxies (and the lab only talks about color, shape, and distance), so your phase V question in that lab must be about one or more of those characteristics of galaxies.

1) Go ahead and ask what you think might be an "easy" question, at least in the beginning. Don't think you have to win a Nobel prize with your question.

2) Don't ask too complicated of a question with several variables, because you also need to actually take the data and come up with a conclusion. Don't make this harder than it needs to be.

3) On the other hand, don't ask something trivial, such as something that could be answered with a simple "yes" or "no." For example, a poor research question would be, "Is the moon in a crescent phase tonight?"

4) Some good questions might start, "How does _____ change over time?" Then you can be more specific, e.g. how does the sun's position/moon's position/constellation's position/star's position/etc... at sunrise/sunset/noon/midnight/etc... change over the course of one week/one month/one year/one hundred years/etc...

5) Look at the questions asked in the previous phases of the lab you are working on. Usually, you will have three different examples of good research questions and maybe you can change one of them a little bit to come up with a new research question.

6) Be sure you use the website that is used throughout the rest of the exercise to take the data or a similar one and don't come up with a question from out of left field. If we are talking about the Sun, don't ask a question about black holes if you don't have that data on the solar website.

7) When you go to write your conclusion, write only about the information you learned by performing the exercise and how that ties in with what you know. Don't go to Wikipedia or another website and do an information dump of non-related facts on that particular subject.

8) If you get stuck, post to the Lab Q&A Forum and see if anyone else has suggestions on coming up with a good question.

Examples of Poor Questions

To assist you in the beginning, here are some examples of what I'm NOT looking for in this lab and why:

· How many stars are in the Hubble Deep Field?

· This was asked in phase I in order for you to see the difference between the stars in our galaxy in this image and the distant galaxies. Your question must be about characteristics of those distant galaxies.

· How many galaxies in the image look like the Milky Way?

· The lab is only about distant galaxies and does not discuss what our own galaxy (the Milky Way) looks like. Your question should only involve information in this image.

· How many galaxies in the image are near each other?

· This actually can't be determined just from this image, since it's a two-dimensional image. Galaxies that look like they're near each other may be enormously far apart, but they're just along the same line of sight from our perspective.

· Is the universe expanding?

· This cannot be determined from this single image. You need redshift data to determine this, which we haven't even learned about in this class yet. This lab is first on purpose. It's about galaxies, which you haven't learned about yet, so that you can focus only on what you learn about them in the lab (color, shape, distance (using size)).

· What temperature are the galaxies in this image?

· Temperature is not something that we measure about galaxies. Focus only on the characteristics described in the lab (color, shape, distance (using size)).

· Why are galaxies different colors (or shapes)?

· "Why" questions can't be answered using this small amount of data. Ask a question that looks at how these characteristics compare in some way. Phases II, III, and IV all have good questions to use as examples, but your question should be different in some way from them.

· Based off the physical characteristics, are the galaxies rotating?

· This can't be determined from this image. We do know that galaxies rotate, but that requires analysis of spectra of many different stars in each galaxy. That's way more complicated than what we're looking at in this lab. Focus only on the characteristics described in the lab (color, shape, distance (using size)).

· Are there more young or old galaxies?

· This is outside the scope of this lab. Focus only on the characteristics described in the lab (color, shape, distance (using size)).

Phase VI—Finally, you will write a short (50-word) summary (details in the lab document). Your summary should NOT include information that you've learned outside the lab (in the book or online, for example). Summarize what you learned just from doing this lab.

Lastly, upload your completed lab document to the assignments area (remember that your name must be in the name of the file).

Questions—Post any questions about the lab to the Lab Q&A Forum. Please include the lab number in your subject line. You can also send me a message with questions.

Additional fun—This video gives you a feel for how deep "deep field" really means:  www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic0406a/

This is a video showing a 3-D "fly-through" of the Ultra Deep Field, along with some words from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of the American Museum of Natural History: Click this link to view at YouTube , if the embedded video doesn't display below.