Modern amateur astronomical telescopes are both powerful and affordable. Spectroscopy - in which the light a star is broken down into a rainbow-coloured spectrum - is becoming more and more popular as instruments and techniques improve with technology. Spectroscopy can tell us a great deal about a star - not the least what it is made of, and how fast it is travelling away from us. Practical Amateur Spectroscopy contains everything an amateur astronomer needs to know to begin observing, but goes relatively deeply into the subject for those who are already involved.

Everything an amateur astronomer need to begin spectroscopic observing, in one book Covers a very wide range of available equipment, from simple DIY spectroscopes to the most expensive commercially-made instruments Describes basic principles to that the reader will understand how to analyse the spectra he sees or records Contributions by leading amateurs astronomers from the USA and Europe! Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt
Section 1 Fundamentals of Spectroscopy.- 1 Development of Stellar Spectroscopy.- 2 Gases and Spectra.- 3 Spectroscopes.- 4 The Spectral Classification of Stars.- Section 2 Practical Amateur Spectroscopy.- 5 The CD Spectroscope.- 6 Photographing and Analyzing the Spectra of Stars.- 7 Two Spectrographs for Small Telescopes.- 8 Amateur Astronomical Spectroscopy with Some Commercial Spectrographs.- 9 Astronomical Spectroscopy with the Santa Barbara Instrument Group Self-Guiding Spectrometer.- 10 Building and Using a High-Precision Radial Velocity Spectrograph.- Appendix 1 Suppliers of Spectroscopes.- Appendix 2 Useful Websites.- Appendix 3 Selected Bibliography.- Appendix 4 The Contributors.