Spectrum of Iridium 96 passing over Norton, MA

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At around 23:03 UT on 19 December we had a -7 Iridium flare, with the track of the flare center passing right over our Wheaton College Observatory! The only downside was that the flare was ~15 degrees from a really bright (65% illuminated) moon. Anyway, I tried a 300 lines/mm blazed grating (thanks to Ron Dantowitz) to see if I could catch a spectrum of the flare. The result is shown above.

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The picture is not bright and therefore requires your monitor to be properly calibrated. While a proper calibration of the monitor is time consuming (and expensive), a quick (and dirty) way is to adjust your monitor so that you can see ALL the 17 different shades in the image below, in particular the darkest shades.


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Last updated: 2015 Dec 22.