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.