Color Acuity

I took the color acuity test twice and scored an 18 the first time and a 7 the second. The second time I took the test I did the excersizes in a different order, moving from the easiest excersizes to the most difficult. I think that's what improved my score.

Observation Time:

9/29/13

Observed waning crescent moon, venus and antares which is present in scorpius. Observed Vega, Deneb and Altair in the summer triangle. All observations were naked eye observations, no app was used.

10/2/13

Observed waning crescent moon and venus. I was in a parking lot so it was too bright to view much else. Naked eye observations, no app used.

10/7/13

Observed waxing crescent moon and the Summer Triangle. The sky was dark which made it easy to see other stars, but identifying which constellation is which is difficult. My phone wasn't working so I could not use SkyMap.
10/9/13

Observed waxing crescent moon, venus and antares. I thought I found Cassiopeia but it was actually Cygnus, as identified by SkyMap. Observations occurred in my driveway.

10/10/13

Observed waxing crescent moon, venus and Cygnus. Observations were naked eye observations and no app was used, observations occurred in my driveway.

10/13/13

Too cloudy to observe anything from my driveway.

10/15/13

Observed waxing Gibbous moon, as well as the constellations I've identified before. Scorpius, Cygnus and the summer triangle. Cassiopeia is easy to find as well. I didn't need to use the app this time, and all observations were naked eye observations in my driveway.

10/16/13

Observed Cetus and Andromeda with the help of SkyMap. Antares is always easy to find because it appears to be flashing red and white. Observed Venus, which is easy to find because it's close to ecliptic and because of it's brightness.


10/17/13

Observed Pegasus, Andromeda and Cetus. I've been varying the times that I've gone out to watch stars, and realized that stars always flash when near the horizon which means several times I've thought I saw Antares it was actually just another star near the horizon. I think for future I'll just check myself with SkyMap to make sure I'm identifying things correctly. The summer triangle is so easy to see, and makes it easy to star hop.

Johannes Kepler

Kepler was born in southwest Germany in 1571. He spent several years of his young life living with his grandparents, and as an adult reflected upon the character of his parents very unfavorably. He wrote of his father, “He destroyed everything. He was a wrongdoer, abrupt and quarrelsome.” He received his education at a Protestant seminary where he primarily studied theology. He taught as a professor of mathematics. Kepler was the first to publicly defend the Copernican system, and received criticism from Martin Luther as well as the Catholic Church.  After the publication of his first book, The Cosmographic Mystery, he was invited by Tycho Brahe to move to Prague and begin calculating the distances of orbits. When Brahe passed away in 1601, Kepler replaced him as the Imperial Mathematician, the most prestigious mathematician appointment in Europe and gained access to his observations before Brahe’s family could claim them and use them for financial gain. His first assignment under Brahe had been to explain the retrograde motion of Mars, which he eventually attributed to elliptical orbits, countering Copernicus’s idea that the orbits were perfectly circular. Kepler also observed the planets had changing velocities, and appeared to move faster when closer to the sun. This became his second law of planetary motion, and stated that planets sweep out equal amount of area over the same amount of time. His third law explained the relationship between how long it takes planets to orbit the sun and how far away they are from the sun. In 1615 there was a witch-hunt in Kepler’s hometown, and his own mother was accused of witchcraft. Her charges were not dismissed until five years later, and Kepler himself was in charge of her defense. Kepler is most known for his laws of planetary motion, but he made many other notable discoveries as well. He was the first to discover that refraction is responsible for vision in our eyes, and that using two eyes enables depth perception. He created eyeglasses that corrected both nearsighted and farsighted vision. He also explained how a telescope worked, describing images, magnification and the properties of reflection. Kepler also claimed that gravity was caused by two bodies, and that the moon was the cause of the tides on Earth. Kepler, earlier in his life, calculated the birth year of Christ.             

                                                            Sources Cited

Voelkel, James R. Johannes Kepler and the New Astronomy. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.

"Johannes Kepler Biography." Space.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

"The Galileo Project | Science | Johannes Kepler." The Galileo Project | Science | Johannes Kepler. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.                                                                                   

Johannes Kepler Sources

http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/kepler.html

The Galileo Project



http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kepler/

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy