ASTR 10, Vista College, Spring 2003

Instructor: Dr. Sallmen & Dr. Korpela

Project #3 - Astronomy in the Media

Due May 8

This project is worth 5% of your final grade, and is due May 8.

Start trying to find an article to discuss now, and contact me if you have any difficulty.

News Media Review

Astronomy is one of the News Media's favorite sciences on which to report. You will often see articles in daily and weekly newspapers about astronomy. The television media often report about celestial events such as eclipses and alignments as well as new pictures from space telescopes. Now the internet has its own news services and they seem as interested in astronomy as ever. How well do they do at accurately reporting about a subject that many of the journalists know nothing about?

In this project you will read an article about astronomy from any print or electronic media. Try to choose an article that contains more than just pretty pictures. You don't need to exclude articles with pretty pictures, but try to find one with more to the content than just a description of the pictures. Write a review of the article and how well the journalist(s) did at explaining the topic (2-3 typed pages, double-spaced). In your review, you should identify at least 3 topics within the article that we have discussed (however briefly) in our class. Would you have known whether or not the article was accurate if you had not taken this class? Please also consider the article assessment questions when preparing your review. Be sure to provide me with a paper copy of the article along with your review. Let me know if you have difficulty locating an article to use.

Here are some useful web-links for this project (some relate to print media). For the more general news sites you will be more likely to find what you need if you click on Science, Technology, or Space (or possibly all three) when you get to the main site. Often there is a search box into which you can type "astronomy" or something more specific (if you do this, be sure to check that the search turns up recent articles). There are many other online resources available - you don't have to restrict yourself to these. For print media, I believe that the SF Chronicle's science pages come out on Wednesdays.