Thanks to Richard Schirato and Gerry Garvey for suggestions.
- Observe sunspots and measure the rotation rate of the sun.
I have equipment that you can borrow for that.
- Build a nitrogen UV laser, and use the
UV laser light for experiments. (I built one of these back in the 70's).
- Aerogel is exotic material, and a rayleigh scatterer, which can be
observed with laser pointers, photocells etc. Also look at the blue sky
and milky water.
- A cloud chamber to observe cosmic rays and tracks from radioactove sources.
The data acquisition can be a digital camera recording lengths
of tracks.
- Ionospheric Disturbance meter. It monitors distant radio
station signals to detect ionization variations due to solar
X-ray flares. There are some designs and maybe printed
circuit boards available on the web from university groups.
- Geomagnetic
field monitor. My daughter built a field monitor based on a
torsion pendulum, laser pointer, and coil to cancel the
primary geomagnetic field. She used a webcam as the data
acquisition, along with a free physics video analysis
package to measure the laser spot position. She was able to
monitor the diurnal variation of the mag field due to
ionospheric currents, and disturbances due to solar wind
fluctuations compressing the geomag field.
- I have heard that silver dendrite growth from silver epoxies,
driven by electric field between traces of a circuit board,
can be observed under a microscope. Variations are
observable on minute to hour time scale. This is an
important applied problem, but also might be a very cool
experiment.
- High speed digital cameras are relatively inexpensive now. There
is a lot of real work still going on on drop dynamics
applicable to a variety of fields. Viscosity and density of
the liquid can be varied. Surface contact angles, etc. can
also be varied.
- There are kits out there to produce sonoluminescence. (This may be
overdone, though.)
- Micrometeorites can be harvested from road dust, for example, with a magnet
and washing process. These can be identified by their shape
under a microscope.
- One can observe the diameter of asteroids through occultation of
stars. There is a website which describes this observation,
has predictions on when they will occur, and will collect
data from observers. Requires a modest size telescope and
someone to drive you to the occultation paths. Many
asteroid sizes have not been measured.
- Many sun-grazing comet fragments are being discovered from the
images from sun observing satellites. These images are on
the web in real time. If you are the first to find and
report one, you get acknowledgement.
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