How big should a rocket’s parachute be? Most online calculators make this straightforward: enter the rocket’s recovery mass, choose a descent speed, and calculate a parachute diameter. That is a useful starting point. If you accept 6 m/s—about 20 ft/s—as a suitable landing speed, the familiar mass-based calculation gives you a parachute size under its assumed … Continue reading Choosing a Rocket Parachute: Why Descent Speed Matters
Control real telescopes. Capture real images. Explore the Cosmos. What happens when a student points a professional telescope perched on a mountaintop thousands of miles away at a galaxy, and watches the image build on their own screen in real time? Students don’t just learn about the night sky, they capture it. Using Slooh’s network … Continue reading Astronomy Enrichment Program
Launch into the exciting world of model rocketry through an engaging hands-on STEM program. Students explore Newton’s laws, aerodynamics, engineering design, and flight testing while building, launching, and refining their own rockets. Emphasizing safety, teamwork, and scientific thinking, this enrichment program transforms physics into an unforgettable experience.
The Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation is one of the most elegant results in classical mechanics. Despite describing everything from hobby rockets to missions leaving the Solar System, the underlying mathematics is surprisingly approachable. Starting with nothing more than conservation of momentum and a little calculus, we can derive an equation that predicts the maximum velocity change … Continue reading The Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation: From Conservation of Momentum to a Model Rocket
In 1919, Arthur S. Eddington, Frank W. Dyson, and Mr. C. Davidson famously led an expedition to photograph a total solar eclipse and confirm Einstein’s prediction that massive bodies like the Sun could bend starlight. That photographic evidence became one of the first major tests of General Relativity. Here, using a digital remaster of the image, I’ll … Continue reading Revisiting Eddington: Measuring Starlight Deflection
(Teaching Materials) I am sharing a set of instructional materials from my Honors Physics unit on Electricity and Electric Fields. The collection includes lesson materials, mini-lessons, assessments, and laboratory activities designed for a typical high-school physics sequence covering circuits, Coulomb’s Law, and electric fields. The unit follows a logical progression beginning with electric circuits and current, … Continue reading Physics Unit – Electricity and Electric Fields
We all run into problems—physics problems, real-life emergencies, coding frustrations, lab setups, you name it. The instinct is often to jump straight into action, but that’s usually how mistakes get made. APEX is a simple framework I use in physics and in everyday thinking to slow things down, bring structure to the chaos, and make … Continue reading APEX – A Framework for Smarter Problem Solving
Here is how to move a simple WordPress blog to Azure Web App Service. This method is not the simplest but it works well enough and is pretty clean. Backup Export the database with a tool such as phpMyAdmin. Then zip up all the files from the wp-content folder. Or you could use a commercial … Continue reading Move a WordPress Site to Azure App Service