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Student laboratories became an integral part of the study of physics around 1870, some forty years later than those in chemistry. The motivation was both cultural and utilitarian, and the situation that produced the innovation was the growth of manufacturing industry in the mid‐19th century. The first published and most influential laboratory manual was that prepared by E. C. Pickering for use at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The laboratory to accompany a one‐semester descriptive astronomy course has been redesigned. Standard topics are retained, but the orientation is changed to introduce the nonscience major to the work of the professional astronomer. Student needs are met by building the laboratory around a solid foundation of astronomical observation. Several semesters of use indicate good success as measured by increased enrollment and positive student feedback.

Most general-physics laboratory manuals and textbooks give inadequate and/or erroneous procedures for assessing the validity of experimental data. This paper advocates a procedure both less time consuming and more rewarding than those usually recommended for general physics laboratories. It uses the range of the results of a limited number of repeated measurements to obtain confidence limits about the probable over-all average of repeating the same procedure a great many times. This procedure is well established among statisticians, but appears not to be well known to physicists.