Seattle amateur astronomer has spectroscopy article in S&T

Seattle Astronomical Society member
Tom Field, creator of RSpec software
for spectroscopy, has an article on the
topic in the August 2011 issue of Sky
 & Telescope. Photo: Greg Scheiderer. 

Local amateur astronomer Tom Field is rapidly becoming the face of spectroscopy for the backyard stargazer. An article by Field, a member of the Seattle Astronomical Society and creator of RSpec spectroscopy software, has been published in the August 2011 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine. The article, titled “Spectroscopy for Everyone”, begins on page 68 of the print edition. Subscribers can view it online as well.

Field spoke about RSpec at a Seattle Astronomical Society meeting a year ago, and I wrote about that talk in my old Seattle Astronomy Examiner column. When he got interested in spectroscopy, Field found existing software difficult to use, prone to crash, not particularly user-friendly, and often in a foreign language. So, as a professional software developer, he set out to create something that worked better for the backyard astronomer, and RSpec was the result.

“It is a big thrill,” Field said of seeing the article in print. He got involved with S&T back in April, when magazine editor Dennis di Cicco interviewed him for the video below about RSpec and spectroscopy. The piece was shot at the Northeast Astronomy Forum (NEAF) in Suffern, New York, and published by Sky & Telescope in May. The current issue of the magazine also features an article and many photos from NEAF, one of the biggest amateur astronomy events in the country.



The lure of spectroscopy for Field is that you can do solid science and analyze the spectral signatures of celestial objects even from light-polluted back yards, and you can do it at pretty low cost. He says that doing spectroscopy also improves his understanding of astronomy; he finds he now reads the literature much more closely.