Student volunteers run educational activities

Every day at the National Air and Space Museum, there are things to learn. The Museum's Education Department has a wealth of hands-on activities that help visitors connect more deeply with the artifacts and exhibits. Many of these interactive experiences are facilitated by our team of education volunteers, which includes many high school and college students.

The two student volunteers in this image are running one of the many hands-on Discovery Stations that can be found throughout both Museum locations. This activity is called Decoding Starlight, and it allows visitors to identify a chemical element based on the colors of light it produces. Visitors observe the glowing gas element through a simple device called a diffraction grating, which splits the light from the gas into its component colors. Those colors are the element's unique spectrum, which is used like a fingerprint to identify the gas.

In this image, between the two black boxes that hold the glass tubes of glowing gas, you'll notice some floating lines of color. This picture was taken looking through a diffraction grating, and those floating lines are the spectra of each gas, which appear on either side of the light source. The red and orange spectral lines are from the element on the left, while the blue and green lines are from the glowing gas on the right. By comparing the observed lines with a chart of catalogued spectra for different gases, visitors can figure out which element is in the tube.

Astronomers study the spectra of stars, galaxies, and other objects to learn what they are made of without having to travel immense distances. The study of light in this manner, called spectroscopy, is how humans have come to understand most of what we know about the universe.