Making Sense of Spectra

This Spectrum Tool will help you connect the visual color display of a light source's spectrum—like the color image you see in a spectroscope—with a graph of the light’s spectrum.

Build and Use a Spectroscope

Slideshow.

  1. Follow the instructions in this Slideshow to build your own spectroscope.
  2. Use the spectroscope to view spectra for lines of different colors within the Slideshow.

Spectrum Notebook. Answer these questions in your notebook:

  1. Describe what you observed when you looked through the spectroscope. How did your observed spectra change as the color of the line changed?