Measuring the Moon's Eccentricity at Home

Caption: View of the moon at perigee and apogee

As a teacher, I'm always on the lookout for labs with simple setups appropriate for students. My current favorite is finding the speed of light with chocolate.

In a new paper recently uploaded to arXiv, Kevin Krisciunas from Texas A&M describes a method for determining the orbital eccentricity of the moon with a surprisingly low error using nothing more than a meter stick, a piece of cardboard and a program meant for fitting curves to variable stars.

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