Basics of Spectroscopy Tool

The concepts of spectroscopy are unfamiliar to most students (and even many scientists!). While our eyeballs are excellent imagers, it is rare that one has an everyday opporutunity to obtain or analyze a spectrum. To introduce the basic concepts of spectroscopy, we have designed a tool that serves two functions: (1) enables the student to experiment with the design for producing a spectrum; and (2) presents the spectrum of several celestial and common-day sources as both a color histogram and an idealized plot. We describe these two modes in greater detail below.

This screen shot shows the experimental design for generating a spectrum. The student has control over the mirror angle and is encouraged to produce a spectrum by directing a light source (the Sun) through a dispersing element (prism). The experiment then illustrates that the various colors of light are spread out producing a spectrum.

										The other principal mode of this tool is the graphical display of an optical spectrum for a set of everyday and celestial objects (the Sun, a sodium street lamp, a quasar, galaxies). The students are encouraged to first view the spectrum as a histogram of colors. This is, of course, the proper discription of the spectra that astronomers analyze for their research. The student can also overlay the idealized spectrum to gain insight into the relationship between color and wavelength.