Spectroscopy

No problem. It only takes about 60 seconds to run a spectrum from 350nm to 800nm at high resolution.

Karl,

The spectrograph is unique, specially designed and engineered parts throughout.

It has been used on an alt/az mount for recording distant terrestrial light sources 10km distance. This was to determine light polluted light sources.

I have nearly built a fork equatorial mount for tracking. The idea is to use it to map extended H alpha emission in nebulae. There is no one researching this application as far as I know. You may be interested!

I have more details if you require them.

Eamonn A

I've used a very DIY setup with the SLR and a piece of grating. Worked fairly well as a 'proof of concept' but was only really practical for classifying bright stars.

Hi Karl,

How do you intend to use spectroscopy to find / verify exoplanets ?
By the radial velocity method ? This is probably beyond the limits of
amateur work (though I'd love to be proved wrong!), Marcy et al. spent
8 years getting their spectroscopy up to scratch : to do radial velocity
work for exoplanets means seeing doppler shifts < 10 m/s. They
(and I think most groups) used an iodine source thats fairly nasty to work
with.

For amateur exoplanet hunting, transits are probably the best way to go.

Rgds
Alastair

I plan to detect them by plotting the photometric intentsity of the host star as a funtion of time. When the planet makes a transit the intensity of the light emanated from the star falls to some level and as the planet disappears in the to darkness the intensity jumps back up.
There are jupiter sized planets out there that have orbital periods of days. So they can be measured over a number of consecutive nights. For example, a Jupiter sized planet was found to be orbiting the star HD 209458 located in the constellation Pegasus. It was detected through the doppler method and then confirmed with the photometric technique. And as a result of observations with the two methods, HD 209458b has been calculated to be about 1/8 the average distance between the Sun and Mercury and has been found to have an orbital period of only 3.5 days.
In California, an exoplanet was discovered by an amateur astronomer with a 8'' Schmidt Cassegrain!

Check out these websites:

www.cbabelgium.com/
www.aavso.org/aavso/

Karl,

I made my first Transit obs of Gliese 581 b on May 7. See posting "First of Exoplanet sized planet" under Cosmology & Physics.

I have a more detailed record that was sent to 'Transit Organisation.' If you require more details let me know.

If you require details about using the wide field spectrograph outlined previously send me an email.

Eamonn A