I got interested in astronomy and collected butterflies and moths at an early age somewhere around ten. I still have an interest in Lepidoptera, i.e., butterflies and moths, and run a Lepidoptera discussion groups called DesertLeps.

I have always been fascinated by the idea of getting spectra of stars. Prior to the advent of the ccd camera, stellar spectroscopy was pretty much in the domain of the professionals. The ccd camera changed everything and in December 2005 a startup French company, Shelyak produced the first very affordable spectrograph for the amateur, the LHIRES III. With a resolution approaching R=18,000, it is now possible for amateurs to make scientific contributions.

In December, 2005 I purchased the spectrograph as a kit that I had to assemble. The kit was very inexpensively priced, $1,200, but now  only the fully assembled instrument is available (see Shelyak).  In August I took possession of a 16" Meade LX200R telescope which saw first light in February 2007. Then in May, 2007 I purchased an ST8-XME SBIG camera. Now I was equipped to do some serious spectroscopy. Originally, I had used the Meade DSI Pro camera, but I had problems with getting guiding to work with Autostar. Later, after I participated in the Epsilon Aurigae Campaign, I replaced it with the SBIG ST-i planetary camera. It works very well with CCDOPS. CCDOPS is a very old software program, dating back to at least 2005 but I can guide on the target star very well with it. If it works, why replace it with something newer? SBIG was bought out by Diffraction Limited. CCDOPS can be downloaded at its Legacy site. 

You can see what the LHIRES III looks like and get more information about it through the LHIRES III link above. What it looks like on my 16" Meade telescope can be seen in the link below that was a presentation given at a AAVSO (American Association of Variable Star Observers) titled "The Fun of Processing a Stellar Spectrum – the HARD WAY."

An example of what can be done with the LHIRES III spectrograph is the following spectrum I took on March 5, 2011. It was part of my participation in the Epsilon Aurigae campaign in 2010 and 2011. This is a spectrum in the two sodium D lines region generated from a program I wrote in SPSS. The program reads a matrix text file that I created with CCDOPS (it is decades old SBIG software but is still useful). Two things show what makes spectroscopy so interesting because of unexpected discoveries. The "Split Line" in the graph is a split line that evolved in its appearance over time. Also, the jagged points of the two sodium D absorption lines show a splitting that also evolved over time. This is discussed more fully in my paper called "Spectroscopic Results From Blue Hills Observatory of the 2009–2011 Eclipse of e Aurigae."