Light Spectrum Lab

Over the past two days we have used Spectroscopes in order to look at different lights and gases. We've looked at everything from a regular lightbulb to helium gases. We weren't just looking at the lights but particularly the spectrum that the lights gave off through the spectroscopes.

We began this process by looking at a regular lightbulb, in an attempt to see RoyGBiv! (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet).

Looking at a regular light, the spectrum consists of all of the colors and it's continuous(there are no gaps in between the colors.)

Then we look at the bulb with a blue liquid in front of it, which showed this type of spectrum. Although it's difficult to see, some colors are missing from this spectrum because of the blue liquid.

After we looked through the blue liquid we looked at the bulb through a red liquid. The red liquid also caused some of the colors to become missing, breaking the continuousness of the spectrum.

Then we looked at both put together! This caused the spectrum to look much different than the regular lightbulb because of the different changes in colors.

We continued looking through the spectroscopes at neon, helium hydrogen, iodine, and a couple of other elements, though I didn't get all of the pictures from them.

The neon looked like this. As you can tell the spectrum is not continuous.

The helium looked like this. This spectrum is not continuous as well. But you can see red, a tiny mix of either yellow or orange, green, and blue.

The iodine looked like this. This spectrum is definitely not continuous. The colors that are missing are parts of yellow, indigo, and violet. But you can see red, orange, parts of yellow, green, and blue very clearly.

The hydrogen looked like this. This spectrum is not continuous. But you can see blue, been, a little spec of yellow, and red.

When looking at RoyGBiv, we look at the energy levels of each color. The highest energy/frequency level is the Violet, while the least is the Red. You only see these colors when they are going from the "excited" state to the "ground" state. This lab taught me a lot about how the different elements give off the different lights. It also taught me how the colored liquid sitting in front of the light can cause the light spectrum to change drastically due to the colors that are absorbed. Light is a lot more than the sun tanning your skin during the summer, it has a lot more minute details and information that it's trying to show.

Atomic Structure and a lot of Other Useful Information

Atomic Structure on Prezi

Separation Lab w/ Colors!!

So we did another separation lab and this one was way cooler!!! We decorated amazing water filter paper. Then we poked a hole in the middle and stuck a paper towel through the hole. The paper towel acted as a post to keep the whole piece of filter paper from falling in the water. Then we put the paper towel in the water and let science do the work!

We waited...

And Waited... 

And waited some more...

and finally!!!

The chromatograph was pretty much all the way done. 

Without even realizing it we used chromatography to separate the colors. Other examples of separation are filtration: when you use a filter to separate the mixture.

This works great with different sizes of hard particles.

Distillation is used for separating mixtures based on differences in the conditions required to change the phase of the components of the mixture. To separate a liquid mixture, the liquid could be heated to force the components with different boiling points, into the gas phase. The gas can then be condensed back into its liquid form and collected.
Double Distillation is when you repeat the process on the collected liquid to improve the purity of that particular product. You can do the reverse process to liquefy components changing a liquid's temperature and/or pressure.

Centrifugation is when they take the tubes and put them in the centrifuge, which viciously spins them, causing the components to separate due to the force of the spinning motion.

Separation Lab (:

First post of the year. Another year, another grade, another science class!
To kick off this year we did a separation lab today.
Here's how we did it:
We took a small beaker and added 8.85 MG of Pure Sugar, 6.01 MG of our Iron Metal Chips, as well as 6.56 MG of Small Boiling Stones. After thoroughly mixing the elements together, and we mean thoroughly!

We TRADED!

We got Steven and Victor's mixture and had to figure out some way to separate it. After many failed ideas, we decided on the easiest solution. To get the iron filings out we took a magnet to the mixture which pulled all of the filings out. We weighed those and ended up with 3.05 MG of filings. This measurement is not far from the actual 4. 23 MG. After attempting to manually separate the calcium chloride and boiling stones and failing! We were stumped on how to separate the remaining elements, but then Mr. Ludwig gave us an amazing idea: Calcium Chloride is dissolvable in water. The boiling stones are not! We measured the combined mixture and got 20.14mg. By using a water filter paper, a funnel, and a beaker we combined the mixture with water, poured it into the funnel and let it rest overnight. When we came back to class the next day the components were separated and we found out that there was 10.06 mg of the boiling stones and 10.08 mg of sand!

^^ Our Work!!! And Koda's awesome boobies bracelet! ^^