What do you do when the weather has been foul and you haven’t been able to do any kind of observing or imaging for a good few days? You build a spectroscope of course!
In all seriousness, the weather has been pretty dire here. Just infinite miles of grey cloud and rain. How do I manage to stay optimistic!!? Anyway, with little more to do than stare blankly at the monolithic cloud cover I thought I’d undertake a little science project. I discovered a nice tutorial for creating a simple spectroscope over at Orbiting Frog and thought I’d give it a go.
As you can see from my attempt, it’s not exactly cutting edge technology but it does the job. I might add, that I omitted the razor blades from my spectroscope purely because I didn’t have any to hand. The end results probably aren’t as focused as they could be if I had used razor blades, but it works, and that’s the main thing.
So how did my homebrew spectroscope fair then? Just take a look at a couple of shots that I took using my Pentax Optio S50 DSC.
On the left hand side you can see light from a dull, overcast day split into it’s blue, green and red components as it passes through the spectroscope while on the right, light from an 11 Watt energy saving light bulb is split. These two light sources produced similar results that are also slightly different. The spectrum from the daylight is diffuse and merged while the spectrum from the light bulb is spread out more with gaps between the blue, green and red.
Compared to the equipment that the professionals use my spectroscope brings new definition to the meaning of low grade, but it gives a pretty good idea how scientist can use one to analyse the chemical composition of stars, nebulae and planets whilst also aiding in the discovery of extrasolar planets.
This really is a worth while and fun project that I’d recommend you try if you’ve got some free time on your hands. Now all I’ve got to do is think about how I can make a larger more permanent version of this kind of spectroscope.
