Concave and convex mirrors

In this lab, we looked at reflected images in concave and convex mirrors.

In a convex mirror, (curved outward) objects appear smaller than normal and warped. This stays the same regardless of where the object is in relation to the mirror.

In a concave mirror, however, interesting things happen. Close to the mirror, objects look much bigger than normal. This happens at distances closer than the focal length of the mirror. When the object is moved farther away, the image inverts and appears to shrink.

After observing the concave and convex mirrors, we constructed ray diagrams and calculated magnification.

From the ray diagrams, we measured the object and the image height in order to calculate magnification, which is M = obj height / img height.
For the convex mirror, the theoretical magnification was 1.25/.25 = 5
For the concave mirror, it was negative 5 because the image is upside-down. (the rays don't intersect properly because the focal point isn't placed quite right)