The September indoor meeting feature and on-line presentation from Tom Field, contributing Editor to Sky & Telescope magazine. Tom, from his home in Seattle, provided a great introduction to affordable spectroscopy for amateur astronomers that was both informative and very entertaining.
Tom Field Presents via the Web
Despite the great distances to the stars, researchers have learned a great deal about quite a few stars. The most common method to study the stars is called spectroscopy, which is the art and science of analyzing the colorful rainbow spectrum produced by a prism-like device. Until recently, spectroscopy was too expensive and too complicated for all but a handful of amateurs. Today, though, new tools make spectroscopy accessible to almost all of us. You no longer need a PhD, dark skies, long exposures, enormous aperture … or a big budget! With your current telescope and FITS camera (or a simple web cam or even a DSLR without a telescope) you can now easily study the stars yourself. Tom showed what it’s all about and helped everyone understand how spectroscopy is used in research and how to get started.
