Rainbow Symphony Diffraction Grating Slides, Linear, 1000 Line/Millimeters, Made in USA, Package of 100

These pre-mounted diffraction gratings are what you need if you want to make a good quality home made spectrometer. Sources for getting these gratings have dried up and this vendor is one of the few that still supplies them. The make a great STEM project for beginning science students. Another use for these gratings is to measure the optical frequencys of inexpensive lasers for Bath interferrometers

I got the 500 lines/mm and it works amazing. Using an extremely narrow slit, I was able to see Frauhofer lines in sunlight (never look directly at the sun)I calculated that there are actually about 521.7 lines/mm. Make sure to check the value against a source with a known wavelength if you want to do quantitative applications.

I used these with my chemistry students to create their own spectrometers when reviewing the electromagnetic spectrum. They worked well for differentiating between continuous and discreet light spectrums. They’re nothing fancy and you can’t get too specific of a read on them, but they work well for a basic lesson.

These are great for understanding how lighting works. If you look at an incandescent light bulb through the slide and a little askance, you see a stretched out version of the light that looks like a rainbow.But if you look at a fluorescent source, you instead see multiple copies of the fixture in discrete colors (shades of red, green and blue) that reveal that the light comes from phosphors that emit these colors. Even if these lights claim to be "full spectrum", the actual spectrum is a discrete sampling of frequencies which together let us see as if the full spectrum were present. Various industrial lights, such as metal halide parking lot lights, have unique and identifiable spectrums.If you want to tell one type of light from another, these slide are infinitely more portable and cheaper than $5000 electronic meters! That said, people don't immediately get the knack of looking askance at a light through a slide. A fancy meter will work better for customer presentations.

While the items were received in good condition and seem to work as advertised but the film is loose in the holders. This causes the film to not be flat. I think if you cut the film and attached it to a microscope slide it might work for more precision work.

Very nice. Great for educational projects. Bright diffraction patterns.

There's a potential for confusion regarding how this product works. This is a "single axis" diffraction grating which means you'll see the point source of light ... and you'll see the rainbow "smear" of the color spectrum produced by that light which will appear both left and right of the point source. Hence the name "linear" diffraction grating because it's all in a nice line. However, you WILL need to hold this VERY close to your eye (perhaps an inch or so away) and will still likely need to look out to one side to see the spectrum. That's just the physics of how the prisms are working - not a product defect.One other caution... avoid touching the film with your fingers (or anything else that might leave any oily residue behind). The gratings are basically a 1000 tiny prisms in every inch. If you touch the film, your fingerprint oils will fill in the gaps between each micro-prism and that will prevent the light from being diffracted correctly.I use these to do explain spectroscopy when doing science outreach. In my case I start with an ordinary tungsten filament light bulb, but then switch to using gas tubes with various gas elements (hydrogen, helium, etc.)

Inexpensive and accurate measure of light spectrum. Highly recommended.