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Session 73 - Instrumentation.
Display session, Wednesday, January 17
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
We report on the use of both blazed and unblazed transmission gratings for doing digital spectroscopy in introductory and advanced physics and astronomy labs. The use of objective prisms to do low resolution spectroscopy in astronomy has a long and glorious history. This history includes the discovery of thousands of quasars and the spectral classification of hundreds of thousands of stars. Most of this work has been accomplished using full-aperture prisms on large Schmidt telescopes using relatively long exposure times with photographic plates as the detector. We describe the use of transmission gratings in a novel "non- objective" mode with modern, affordable Charge-Coupled- Device (CCD) detectors. When used with amateur-sized telescopes or commercial camera lenses this enables one to do meaningful, quantitative spectroscopy in even the introductory lab environment. Examples of laboratory and astronomical spectra will be shown and discussed.
