Research and develop a short presentation (~5 minutes) on a subject that would communicate information, e.g. to a friend or family member, about an astronomical topic that interests you. This could either be on a topic that we have covered or it could be a topic that we haven't talked about but which the class material might help you to understand better. I want the presentation to be something that would be interesting to watch, listen to, or read if you were a typical person, and, of course, factually correct! The idea is to demonstrate that you can communicate a concept effectively (which is a good demonstration that you understand it well).

I strongly encourage you to submit this as a video or audio presentation. If you do this, you can work in pairs, perhaps making the presentation in an interview or discussion format (although creativity in presentation is encouraged!). Unfortunately, we will not have time to listen in class to these presentations, so you will just be handing them in for me to listen to and/or read. You can either: email these to me, post them somewhere where I can download them from, or bring them to class on a flash drive for me to copy. Electronic files should be named using your last name(s) so it is easy for me to know whose is whose!

Alternatively, you can write your presentation up as a paper, but if you do this, you have to do it individually; I recommend that you read your paper aloud before you hand it in (by the way, I think this is a great thing to do for any paper that you write!).

PowerPoint presentations are NOT acceptable unless they have accompanying audio!

Part of the point of the assignment is to get you to practice some basic research techniques. Remember that if you quote or use material from another source, you must provide a reference to it in your presentation!

The presentation will be judged on a combination of:

demonstration of a good understanding of the subject you're presenting
ability to communicate this understanding to an audience that has less background that you do
degree to which presentation is interesting (a simple list of facts doesn't make a great presentation)
choice of subject: something beyond what we've done in class is preferred to something we've already done
creativity in presentation
for papers, proper use of grammar
appropriateness of references

Please recall that plagiarism is a serious offense. It is your responsibility to understand what plagiarism means, to be aware that both intentional and unintentional plagiarism is prohibited, and to be aware that plagiarism extends to material found online. See http://www.nmsu.edu/~vpsa/SCOC/misconduct.html for more information.

Some possible topics might be:

Describe how to find one of the following objects in the sky and when you can see it, and discuss what astronomical information we know about it, how we have learned this information, why this type of object is interesting in astronomy, and why it is interesting to you:
- Orion nebula
- Betelgeuse
- globular cluster M15
- Polaris
- Andromeda galaxy
- the ``Kepler field'' (see Kepler space mission)
- any other astronomical object of interest to you
Discuss recent discoveries of planets around other stars.
Discuss some current experiment being done to try to detect dark matter
Describe the nature and properties of black holes.
Describe the mission, discoveries, and status of the "Martian rovers" (Spirit/Opportunity, or Curiousity)
Describe the strange and peculiar satellites (moons) of Saturn as viewed by the Cassini mission.
Describe the mission and the results of the Huygens probe that penetrated the atmosphere and landed on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan.
Explore the recent discoveries of large Kuiper belt objects (e.g., "UB313") and Pluto's relationship with them.
Describe and discuss the "New Horizons" mission which is on its way to Pluto.
Discuss the four "Galilean" satellites of Jupiter, and the possibility that one (or more) of them may be a possible host for life, and how NASA is planning to search for that life.