Astronomical Spectroscopy: You Can Almost Touch The Stars

Tom Field has been a Contributing Editor at Sky & Telescope Magazine for the past 7 years. He is the author of the RSpec software (www.rspec-astro.com) which received Sky & Telescope Magazine’s “Hot Product” award in 2011. Tom is a popular speaker who has spoken to hundreds of clubs via the web and in-person..

Even if you wanted to touch a star, they’re all impossibly distant. Despite these great distances, astronomers have learned an enormous amount about stars. How? The most common method to study the stars is called spectroscopy, which is the science of analyzing the colorful rainbow spectrum produced by a prism-like device. Until recently, spectroscopy was too expensive and too complicated for all but a handful of amateurs. New tools make spectroscopy accessible to almost anyone. © 2021

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