Equipment Page

The spectra were obtained with the following equipment:

• 17.5" Dobsonian telescope on a home-made equatorial platform made from hardware store material
  
• More information on equatorial platform
  

• Home-made grating spectrometer with a Cookbook 245 CCD Camera

• 600 or 1200 g/mm grating
  135 mm focal length internal optics (using commercial camera lens)
  76 or 38 nanometer spectral range tunable from 400 to 900 nm.
  .3 or .15 nanometer resolution
• Spectrometer mounted at Newtonian focus of telescope

• More information on spectrometer
  

• Image stabilization system
  • Currently undergoing testing. Uses:
  • Connectix B&W Quickcam
  • Stepper Motors
  • PC with two parallel ports
  • Simple drive electronics with address decoder, 2 D/A converters opamps and drive transistors
• More information on Image Stabilizer