Cheap spectrophotometer

[Dr Paul Leyland]

Anyone have any thoughts about this? https://chriswesley.org/spectrometer.htm

It is too big at 80mm diameter and possibly too heavy and/or long to be plugged into a standard 2″ eyepiece holder. However, perhaps an adapter and/or truss could be printed. Alternatively it could be fibre-fed to a fixed location.

It looks attractive because of its low price and relatively good resolution of 400, or 2nm over the UVOIR range. The web page is ambiguous: it quotes both 2nm and 1nm, though one may be the resolution and the other the accuracy of measurement of peaks.

The kit I would really like to have is at least fifty times the price.

Thanks,
Paul

[Robin Leadbeater]

Dr Paul Leyland wrote:

The kit I would really like to have is at least fifty times the price

The difference is the one 50x the price would actually work (for astronomy) 😉

Beyond the introductory Star Analyser at ~ the same price as this, for around £1k you can get a pretty capable and versatile 3D printed astronomical spectrograph kit, the StarEx
http://www.astrosurf.com/solex/sol-ex-stars-en.html
The optical components are supplied by Shelyak and you can get the 3D components as a kit if you don’t want to print them yourself

Cheers
Robin

[Dr Paul Leyland]

Thanks Robin!

[Robin Leadbeater]

BTW looking at the example solar spectrum in the video, the resolution is nowhere near 2nm (more like 5-10x that). Compare with my simple “SEPSA” (Slit-EyePiece-Star Analyser) setup for example
http://www.threehillsobservatory.co.uk/astro/spectroscopy_18.htm
or the slitless collimated Junk Box design
http://www.threehillsobservatory.co.uk/astro/spectroscopy_19.htm

These are just a bit of fun though. A slit/fibre fed spectrograph really needs a guider module so you can find, focus and place the star on the slit/fibre and keep it there

Cheers
Robin

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