I have always wanted to do spectroscopy of the stars here at my observatory. There have been a lot of photometry (multi band as well) that i have done in the past years. Though i will be doing it again but for now, its finding more about the stars with Spectroscopy.

Equipment

I will write much more about the equipment that i am using for my setup here and how did i managed to adjust it appropriately; for now it is enough to say that i am using my Celestron C14 telescope and SBIG ST9XE CCD camera with Star Analyser grating.

Software

I am capturing the images through SkyX Pro software. This is the software that controls my whole observatory. Losmandy Titan mount, CCD camera and all its accessories. The controls are so intuitive and once you know how to use it, you are almost on autopilot using it.

I use Maxim DL for data reduction. This has been THE software i have used for years, for data reduction and some analysis. I finally used Rspec software for analyzing the spectrum of Vega. Tom Field who wrote the software and is a big big help in promoting spectroscopy in amateur community around the globe, has been a good friend of mine and so very kindly gave me this software free of charge. Thanks a million my friend!

Image Acquisition

Vega is already a very bright star and my telescope's 14 inch mirror makes it very hard to not saturate the pixels. These days it is very hazy here.. clouds, high winds and what not. My exposure was 10th of a second for every sub i got! Yes it is super short exposure but i was also fighting the wind.I captured hundreds of images and selected the least effected by the winds.

Results

Here is the image of the star Vega and its spectrum:

Already i could see the absorption lines in the spectrum! What a view :) Vega is of Spectral class A and in this class Hydrogen Absorption lines are easily seen. Those who know, balmer series is right in front of you!

I did the calibration of this spectrum in Rsec and did a non-linear calibration to get more precise measurements of the absorption lines in the spectrum. Here is the snapshot of the calibration process.

After the calibration process the hydrogen lines fell at the right place. Here i have identified them with the wavelength. See, how cool is that! So i announce to the world: Vega has hydrogen folks!! Go ahead and re-write your textbooks.. :) ok.. alright.. i am being over excited here.

This is just a start.. I have collected a lot of data with my spectroscopy setup and will be analyzing it all and posting it very soon.