Optics
The Spectroscope
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Looking through this handheld tube splits ordinary light into a full spread of rainbow colors, revealing that “white” light is actually a mix of every color at once.
Look through the spectroscope at different light sources. Do you always see the same rainbow?
Additional Information
A prism or diffraction grating inside bends different wavelengths of light by different amounts, fanning them out into a spectrum.
Astronomers use the exact same trick on telescopes to figure out what distant stars are made of, just from their light.
Different light sources — sunlight, an LED bulb, a fluorescent tube — each show a slightly different pattern of colors through a spectroscope.