What Experiments Can I Conduct to Explore the Doppler Effect?

[rwylde]

Hi - I'll keep this relatively short. I'm doing an investigation into the doppler effect and I need to do a series of 3 to 5 experiments in order to prove/show something. At the moment I am a little lost as to what I could experiment into regarding the doppler effect, and how to go about it in the lab.

Some ideas I've had:

- Use a turntable with a speaker mounted on it, and a few meters aways on the other side of the room or so have a receiver.
- Investigate into the effect of wind etc..

So, could you guys point me in the right direction and comment on those few ideas so far, as well as offering other effects of doppler that I could investigate (in the lab)?




Kind Regards,
Richard.

 

[berkeman]

Well, the classic example is a train passing by you. There are several train tracks in the city where I live, and the trains are required to blast their horns as they approach and pass intersections where a road crosses the tracks. Listen to the doppler shift change as they roll past blowing their horn.

Another similar situation is to stand in the landing flight path of the airport, and listen for the change in pitch as the plane passes over you. Except nowadays, standing just outside an airport in the landing path might be frowned upon...

How are you recording your data? Do you just write down your observations? Or do you make audio recordings? Or do you have the ability to digitize the audio to show the frequency shift?

 

[Danger]

You might also, if you have the equipment, photograph the spectra of two similar stars of differing recession rates to show the EM redshift.