Solar System B

[brobo]

You won't need to know anything about constalations this year. You will only need to know what is in our solar system, which only has one star.
[wiki][/wiki] Solar System Wiki

[AlphaTauri]

Well, you need to know which constellations the planets appear in on the night of the competition, but that's it.

[macterror]

I'm wondering if anybody knows whether or not you can use a hand lens to view the note sheet.

[AlphaTauri]

Nope, not allowed. You're only allowed to bring a two-sided page of notes and a basic calculator. Even though the rules say nothing about forbidding hand lenses, that probably would violate the "spirit of the event" (no interpreting rules to give you an unfair advantage, that kind of thing).

[gopanda13]

do we really have to indentify exactly which constellations all planets are visible in on the evening of the day of competition? do we just have to memorize them?

[AlphaTauri]

Well, there's only 7 other planets and not all of them will be visible at the same time. Personally, I'm going to make sure I can ID the constellations, just to be safe.

[Uranium235]

You can easily obtain a star chart with planets in them. For example, Heavens Above has daily updates on the positions of planets. Personally, i find that segment fairly easy, being that i did RFS last year

[AlphaTauri]

If anyone wants, I can upload pictures like this:

to show the location of the planets on any given date, time, and place.

Edit: Except that I can't see the picture. Stupid IE.
Edit2: Never mind, I can see it now.

[kjhsscioly]

a very good star chart site : http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=2297

[SOninja]

thanks people for those star chart pictures/websites! they were very interesting

I've been studying formulas and so far I only know these 4 (but i can manipulate them to solve for mass or radius or whatever)

Newton's law to find gravitational force exerted between two objects
finding gravitational acceleration for a planet
finding escape velocity
finding satellite orbit period & satellite mean orbital radius (from kepler's third law)

Are there any more you could suggest that I study?