Spectroscopy equipment?

[White Rabbit]

Is there such a thing for amatures? Surely someone has devoloped some software to do this by now.
I think it would be kind of cool to look at different stars and work out what they are made of.

Thanks

[bojan]

Iris.. and here:
http://www.astrosurf.com/buil/

[rogerg (Roger)]

Yes, there's a few options. I looked it all up a couple of years back when I thought of getting in to it. Bought a Cokin rainbow filter to make my own. Bought a book about how to do it, but never took it further.

Companies I can remember who sell spectrascopes:

http://www.starspectroscope.com/
http://www.sbig.com/

Roger.

[renormalised (Carl)]

Yes there is.

You can also make one yourself, see here...

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~rhill/spect/spect.html

Spectroscopy is extremely interesting, and just figuring out what the spectral class of individual stars is, is just the beginning. Once you start taking spectra of galaxies and such, you get into the really interesting stuff....redshift determination (Z numbers), mass-luminosity-rotation rate functions (Tully-Fisher relationship) and a raft of other goodies

[Heian (Mark)]

Having had a star analyser for a couple of years, I can highly recommend them. With a bit of very simple work they can placed in front of an unmodded 350D and you can obtain usable spectra with quite short exposure times, less than 5 secs.
I can get spectra from a fixed tripod / 350D / 135mm lens combo as quickly as 2 secs exposure, depending on the star magnitude.

http://www.patonhawksley.co.uk/staranalyser.html

regards

Mark

[Quark (Trevor)]

Originally Posted by White Rabbit

Is there such a thing for amatures? Surely someone has devoloped some software to do this by now.
I think it would be kind of cool to look at different stars and work out what they are made of.

Thanks

Hi White Rabbit,

I have had a Rainbow Optics Star Spectroscope for several years.
Don Whitman from Bintel put me on to it. It is of very high quality and relies on a blazed grating.

I use it when I have school groups around observing. The grating screws into a eyepiece barrel, typically 16mm to 20mm does the job. It would be possible to image through it using an eyepiece projection setup, something I have not yet tried.

Regards
Trevor

[renormalised (Carl)]

The other one Mark has the address for looks a good one too. It'd be worth it to get both of them. You can never have too much equipment