• Apparent retrograde motions of planets

Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, virtually all in-person instruction was shut down across the country in 2020 and beyond. This posed special problems for laboratory-based science courses, as those are defined by the conducting of experiments in person and often with specialized equipment unavailable outside of the classroom. Here I discuss a semester-long project for introductory astronomy that can be performed at home with very basic and inexpensive equipment. And, thanks to the vagaries of the orbits of the planets, variations of this activity can be carried out in many future semesters.