Since the discussion is on spectroscopy, I wanted to point members to a program I've recently released that makes it easy to capture spectra:
http://www.rspec-astro.com.
When I got started in spectroscopy, I found that it required quite a few steps (with several different software programs) to go from a camera image to a profile graph that actually shows the spectrum. I wrote RSpec in response to the fact that I felt that the tools that were available were not well integrated and resulted in an unnecessarily complicated workflow.
While RSpec works with any imaging equipment, I see some of you have webcams, which can be used with the program to do
real-time spectroscopy. It's quite exciting to see a spectrum real-time. For example, when you point your gear at Vega, you can immediately see the Hydrogen lines.
There are a lot of videos on the site that show the software in-action.
Tom