Spectroscopy
I have recently bought a 'Staranalyser' diffraction grating to carry out some basic spectroscopy. The 100 lines/mm grating is built into a standard adaptor to fit the rear thread of a 1.25" eyepiece or CCD camera nosepiece and so was very easy to put to use. I simply screwed it into the Artemis 285 nosepiece and then into the 14" at prime focus. The exact distance is important to get a reasonable dispersion but luckily this worked out ok for me without any further spacers etc. The dispersion I obtained was 11 Angstroms/pixel. I chose Vega as my first target as this A-type star is recommended as an easy first target because of the presence of strong hydrogen Balmer lines in its spectrum.
This is the result I obtained after processing.
The spectrum was processed and calibrated in Visual Spec, including producing the simulated colour spectrum at the bottom of the graph. This is an excellent freeware program if a little difficult to learn at first. Once you get to grips with the basic features there are many things you can explore with the aid of the program.
Excellent information on amateur spectroscopy can be found here.