Spectroscopy
Most of my astronomy interests are in the area of photometry but the science of spectroscopy has also come to amateurs! At the SAS/AAVSO Meeting in 2009 I purchased a Star Analyzer Grating from Olivier Thizy, owner of Shelyak instruments in France. This began an off again on again love affair with spectroscopy. In 2011 I ran across Tom Field who is the designer of R-Spec. After doing some testing for Tom I was sold on R-Spec and began to really learn how to use it. Up until R-Spec the amateurs options for processing data were limited. In Europe amateurs were taking spectroscopy much more seriously than their American counterparts and out of this came several freeware programs for processing data. Besides the difficulty of learning the programs the software continually crashed on my computer. So when R-Spec came out and was easy to use and had few issues on computers I was sold. Below is a sample of what a grating, scope and R-Spec can do!
As this is being written I am putting the finishing touches on the shelter for my observatory TRO. One of the scopes will be a dedicated 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain at 6.3 Focal Ratio with the Star Analyzer 100 grating permanently installed. This combination should yield good results on stars down to 13th magnitude. Keep an eye on this page for updates in the near future.
Here are some helpful links:
http://www.astrosurf.com/buil/
http://www.threehillsobservatory.co.uk/astro/spectroscopy.htm
Antares using the Star Analyzer on a 8" Meade LX200 SC and DSI camera.
Here is the spectra in graph form using RSpec to calibrate it.