- Like
- Digg
- Del
- Tumblr
- VKontakte
- Flattr
- Buffer
- Love This
- Odnoklassniki
- Meneame
- Blogger
- Amazon
- Yahoo Mail
- Gmail
- AOL
- Newsvine
- HackerNews
- Evernote
- MySpace
- Mail.ru
- Viadeo
- Line
- Comments
- Yummly
- SMS
- Viber
- Telegram
- Subscribe
- Skype
- Facebook Messenger
- Kakao
- LiveJournal
- Yammer
- Edgar
- Fintel
- Mix
- Instapaper
- Copy Link
Want to discover the chemical make-up of distant stars and planets? Use a spectroscope. It displays a little rainbow of visible-light spectrum that’s emitted
by a star (or reflected by a planet).
Each element in the periodic table has its own spectral signature — say, bright emission lines in the red band, or dark absorption lines in the green — so each element can be identified by its light alone.
MAKE Volume 24 shows you how to make a high-resolution spectroscope for $20 using common pipe and hardware. To turn it into a spectrograph that’ll reveal if you’re looking at a gas giant or a rocky planetoid, just team it with a digital camera and author Simon Quellen Field’s online spectrum analyzer (we show you that, too).
It’s one of a dozen cool DIY space projects in the new issue of MAKE.
Check out MAKE Volume 24:
MAKE blasts into orbit and beyond with our DIY SPACE issue. Put your own satellite in orbit, launch a stratosphere balloon probe, and analyze galaxies for $20 with an easy spectrograph! We talk to the rocket mavericks reinventing the space industry, and renegade NASA hackers making smartphone robots and Lego satellites. This, plus a full payload of other cool DIY projects, from a helium-balloon camera that’s better than Google Earth, to an electromagnetic levitator that shoots aluminum rings, and much more. MAKE Volume 24, on sale now.
2 thoughts on “How-To: Make a $20 spectrograph (from MAKE Volume 24)”
Comments are closed.
I went ahead and made one of these (actually two – after the first, I wanted a bigger one). See it at http://galacticstudios.org/component/content/article/8-science/19-spectroscope