Rainbow Symphony Diffraction Grating Slides - Linear 1000 Line/Millimeters 25 Pack 01603-25 25

Amazing science for the money

We built take-home STEM kits for our students, and these grating slides were a perfect addition to our program's astronomy class. They are well-constructed and will "hopefully" hold up well to student use (they are students, so no guarantees!). The price was great, too!

Colors are hard to see.

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.

I purchased these actually as party favors for a science party and my toddler has since become fascinated by them. They function as expected and decompose various light sources into their appropriate spectra. Try looking through them at car headlights, smartphone screens, various lamps, pretty much anything illuminated.

These gratings work well. I received 25 gratings as advertised. and I'm glad I did. I only needed a few gratings for DIY spectrometer I was making. 4 or 5 of these gratings had either some nasty fingerprints or some sort of dust/dirt. The rest of the 20 were acceptable. I saw some other offers for a little less money but only for 10 gratings. The rejection rate is high but if you receive 20 out of 25 usable ones it was just fine with me