Analyze light by creating a CD spectroscope in this activity. See the whole spectrum of light with the spectroscope.

Students use the spectrograph from the "Building a Fancy Spectrograph" activity to gather data about different light sources. Using the data, they make comparisons between the light sources and make conjectures about the composition of...

Light travels as waves. Waves can be described by their amplitude, wavelength and frequency. The speed of a wave can be calculated from its frequency and wavelength.

Provides fun activities to do involving sunlight.

Students are introduced to different ways of displaying visual spectra, including colored "barcode" spectra, like those produced by a diffraction grating, and line plots displaying intensity versus color, or wavelength. Students learn...

Learn about the diffraction of light using the wave model and Huygen's principle.

[Free Registration/Login may be required to access all resource tools.] Explains the terms diffraction, interference, and interference patterns. Describes the double slit experiment and how to determine the wavelength of a double slit...

This lab is designed to allow students to look at the spectra of a handful of elements when light from a glowing sample of those elements travels through a diffraction grating.

[Free Registration/Login may be required to access all resource tools.] Explains what causes single slit interference of light and how to find the wavelength of a single slit interference pattern using a formula.

A study guide for concepts related to wave optics.

This lab is designed to allow students to look at the factors affecting the location of different colors formed by diffraction grating.

Source of information on the subject of weather photography. There are great links, images and tips on equipment to use. For the intermediate to advanced photographer.

Conduct virtual experiments with water, sound, and light waves to determine the sine wave and patterns created in each.

A short biographical sketch of Thomas Young's (1863- 1942) life as a mathematician and a scientist. Gives an account of his birth and the final years of his life.

Identify the composition of stars by applying the ideas of quantum theory. Investigate the field of spectroscopy, and examine the spectra of stars to locate the emission and absorption lines of hydrogen.

Acting as a subtopic of the General Chemistry Virtual Textbook's section on Atoms and the Periodic Table, this site discusses wavelength and the uncertainty principle. Information is also provided on de Broglie wavelength and electron...

Discusses Rayleigh scattering in plain language and attributes the blueness of the skies to this phenomenon. Discussion of scattering is just one topic of many on this lengthy page of optical topics.

You've probably noticed the colorful patterns "reflecting" from the shiny surface of a CD disk. What you are seeing is actually diffraction of white light, and the rainbows of color are diffraction patterns. In this project you'll learn...

The Nobel Foundation provides a biography of Bragg. This site focuses primarily on his activities and accomplishments as a scientist.

This site from ScienceWorld provides a very short but factual biographical sketch of Thomas Young (1773-1829 CE) and describes his most notable scientific discoveries and contributions. Links are also provided throughout for additional...

This site, in German, offers numerous apps that illustrate common physics principles. Apps are organized into categories: mechanics, oscillations and waves, electrodynamics, optics, thermodynamics, the theory of relativity, physics of...

Students use authentic spectral data from the Cassini mission of Saturn and Saturn's moon, Titan, gathered by instrumentation developed by engineers. Taking these unknown data, and comparing it with known data, students determine the...