Jonathan Aurnou and Peter Shimer named winners of the 2013 Vernier Engineering Contest
Shimer and Aurnou built a transiting exoplanet experiment by putting a 5? globe incandescent bulb in the center of a turntable and a “planet” out near the edge. Students set up their Vernier light sensors (LS-BTA) and recorded transit data as the table rotated. The students wrote NI LabVIEW programs to acquire and stack multiple transits of the exoplanet, then use their data to calculate the radius of the exoplanet (using theory developed in class).