dc.contributor	Armosky, Brad	en
dc.contributor	Hemenway, Mary Kay	en
dc.creator	University of Texas at Austin	en
dc.creator	McDonald Observatory	en
dc.date.accessioned	2014-06-25T20:44:49Z	en
dc.date.available	2014-06-25T20:44:49Z	en
dc.date.issued	2001	en
dc.description	Introduction: Astronomy fundamentally changed after Henry Draper first photographed the spectrum of the star Vega in 1872. Soon thereafter, astronomers began surveying the stars and photographing their spectra. The resulting flood of stellar spectra was a blessing and a challenge. The bewildering variety of stellar spectra demanded a simple, adaptable, and meaningful organization system. By 1924, Annie Jump Cannon had revised the stellar spectra organization system and personally classified over two hundred thousand stars. Her basic system is still in use today. In this activity, students begin their exploration by following in Cannon’s footsteps to organize a few stellar spectra. Later they learn that the absorption features in the spectrum change according to the temperature of the star. Given this information, they may revise their organization scheme and order the stars by temperature. In this way, they come to understand the code for temperature in a star’s spectrum. In the explanation section, students learn the history of how Cannon and others dealt with this same problem	en
dc.description.department	McDonald Observatory	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/2152/24839	en
dc.language.iso	eng	en
dc.publisher	McDonald Observatory	en
dc.subject	TEKS	en
dc.subject	Astronomy	en
dc.subject	star Vega	en
dc.subject	Science	en
dc.subject	Outer Space	en
dc.subject	Lesson Plan	en
dc.subject	Spectroscopy	en
dc.subject	interference patterns	en
dc.subject	Grades 9-12	en
dc.title	Journey into Spectroscopy	en
dc.type	Learning object	en

Journey into Spectroscopy

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