All Textbook Topics - Light - Investigating the law of reflection with a ray box - To accurately mark the reflected ray, you need to mark small crosses with a sharp pencil in the middle of the reflected ray.

To accurately mark the reflected ray, you need to mark small crosses with a sharp pencil in the middle of the reflected ray.

When using the ray box like this, the ray of light tends to spread out. To account for this, when you mark the reflected ray, you must mark it using small crosses in the middle of the ray and then connect them up later with a ruler.

Here is a shot showing the crosses carefully marked in the middle of the reflected ray.

Once you have drawn the crosses you will use a ruler to connect them up, giving you a diagram that looks like the final diagram at the bottom of this page.

If you are very careful with lining everything up, this is what you should get when you connect up your crosses:

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You need to line the incident ray up with the ray on paper so that the drawn line is exactly in the middle of the light ray.
Next
To measure the angle of the reflected ray, you must use a protractor to measure the angle between the reflected ray and the normal.

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