I've been reading old textbooks, and got to the diffraction chapter. This reminded me that I have a camera and some diffraction grating glasses, and that means that I have a spectrograph to play with.
Then I discovered my camera's battery is dead.
So I used my cell phone instead. I plan on doing a mosaic tomorrow when my camera is charged, but thought I'd post this picture today.
The coolest things? Determining what the light source is by the spectrum. See the blocks of red, green and blue about half way up? Florescent lights of a building out of frame. The bright one a third from the bottom? High pressure sodium. You can see the notch for the sodium line if you zoom in (it's clear on the in-focus pictures, but they have a lot of background issues). Just below the sodium lamp (and above another sodium lamp), you can see the continuous spectrum from a car's headlights.
Science. It's hiding everywhere around you, but you can only see it if you're wearing the magic glasses.
Science glasses. They're science glasses. Not magic. Science.
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