Measuring Background Radiation in Different Environments

The various sources of radiation contributing to the overall background rate measured by a Geiger counter are discussed, especially the cosmic radiation and the environmental radiation of terrestrial origin. Measurement of the background rate carried out for several days in different environments and under different amounts of shielding are presented and discussed as possible activities to be organized. The moving average algorithm is introduced, as a tool to analyse the result of time series measurements by a smoothing of the data.