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What does the Sun and a Candle flame have in common? Sodium. And Ill show you the images to prove it! So without delay, let me show you some shots I took with it today in color using the 1200 lines per mm grating. Here is a candle flame, with a strong scent of ginger added by the manufacturer. This makes the sodium lines:
Next, it is mostly cloudy today, so I aimed the spectrograph at a cloud illuminated by pure sunlight:
So this shows the dark fraunhofer lines of sodium in the same location as the bright candle flame sodium. Then i scanned the spectrum with the tuning lever and got a few more solar features while I was at it: Here is the Calcium K and H doublet - our favorite solar imageing lines!
Hydrogen Alpha line in all its glory:
The gorgeeous Magnesium triplet:
Finally, our atmosphere of the Earth adds some absorbtion lines deep in the infrared. While the imageing source cameras do poor in the UV, the IR response is out of this world. Here is atmospheric oxygen lines:
Well thats it for now. This first step in getting the spectroheliograph working is to simply spend some time just looking at our nearest star and getting our bearings! Once I get this darn thing painted black inside the results will be better. But I couldnt wait to see what was possible....
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