and it was WAY COOL! I have never seen anything like this. I built it out of cardboard and a magnifying glass, but it was amazing. I pointed it at my desk lamp, looked through the lens, and I could see a neat pattern of different light colors. (green, red, yellow, purple were the main colors). If I pointed the spectroscope at different light sorces, (my window, a light bulb, a "energy efficient" light bulb) the colors changed. Not the actual colors but the spacing of them, and their thickness. For example, sunlight has the largest spacing between the colors. My desk lamp, however, has almost no spacing. How this works is very complicated.
As Wikipedia explaines it,
"When a material is heated to incandescence it emits light that is characteristic of the atomic makeup of the material. Particular light frequencies give rise to sharply defined bands on the scale which can be thought of as fingerprints. For example, the element sodium has a very characteristic double yellow band known as the Sodium D-lines at 588.9950 and 589.5924 nanometers, the color of which will be familiar to anyone who has seen a low pressure sodium vapor lamp."
Of course, my first reaction is "What the #$!&*?"
However, This is what I think Wikipedia means.
The spectroscope breaks up the light into different colors. Kind of like the RGB in a picture. (for you non-geeks, each pixel in a picture has a certain value of Red, Green, and Blue. mixed together, these create the final color.) Depending on the light sorce, these colors are split apart, which create the black spaces between them. (These are called Fraunhofer lines, after the man who discovered them.) Based on this combination of colors, thicknesses, and spaces, scientists can determine some part of the chemical makeup of the light source, as well whether or not it is moving.
Below, you can see some pictures I have taken of the bars.
