barospection
Course repository for the Intro to Spectroscopy 2026
taught for BRIEF Boyce Astro Foundation by Chandru Narayan. (updated Jun 8, 2026) - email chandru@ drunarayan@gmail.com if you have any questions about the seminar.
BAROSpection - Introduction to Spectroscopy 2026 course flyer
Add yourself to the waitlist for this Seminar Class Starts Tuesday, Apr 28, 2026
SLACK CHANNEL LINK FOR ALL COMMUNICATIONS! - Please look here for Q&A and student contributions
What’s New
- 060726 - Complete the following steps for plotting your Mystery Stars against a background of Milky Way Stars in the FINAL HRD
- 060226 - Meeting Recording from today at 6:30 PM for completeing our OPEN Cluster analysis
- 051926 - NO SESSION TODAY - NOT FEELING WELL
- 051526 - Solution for OPEN CLUSTER M45 HRD Project #6 Notebook posted. Please complete M67 in a similar manner
- 051226 - Session recording added
- 051226 - Added OPEN CLUSTER HRD Project #6 Notebook
- 051126 - Added Final Project #7 Notebook
- 050626 - Session recording added
- 050526 - Assignment Note on Harvard Scientists workflow for determining star types
- 050526 - Mystery Star Assignments for Final Project - read ahead start now if you like!
- 050226 - Added Tom Field’s amazing instructions for our RSpec analysis
- 042826 - Google Meet Recordings posted for both April 28th Class & Live sessions
- 042826 -
Added LIVE spectral imaging session April 28th 8:00 PM Pacific - 042526 -
Complete the Slack & Hand Compute CC assignments ahead of April 28th - 042426 - wide-ranging content updates and Jupyter notebooks for Spring 2026 BAROSpection seminar.
The BAROSpection - Intro to Spectroscopy seminar will cover a smattering of interesting or historically significant Spectroscopy topics in no particular sequence. However, the main goal of this course is to teach critical college and research skills that you will need as a motivated student, researcher or hobbiyist. We will attempt to develop these skills primarily on Spectroscopy related topics as you clearly are astro enthusiasts! The primary audience for this course are advanced High/Middle School, College students, Hobbyists or Early Career Researchers. We also care about accessibility of these resources across student communities who may be underrepresented and of a diverse socio economic background. We hope to keep these resources free and open for use as much as possible to anyone who may be interested. Please contact me at drunarayan@gmail.com if you would like to learn more about this course.
Skills we will teach include:
- Jupyter Notebooks (the backbone of JupyterLab)
- JupyterHub & JupyterLab (dev environment for Jupyter Notebooks adopted widely by universities)
- Markdown Syntax (dynamic text, images, video and code embedded publishing)
- Python (language of choice for data science and STEM publications)
- Pandas & Numpy (dataframes and math libraries for Python)
- Matplotlib (plotting large amounts of data)
- LaTeX (web and github enables equation editor for research)
- SQL (structured query language for querying astro databases)
- Lastly, and significantly, using RSpec to analyze Spectra of Stars and Nebulae in our Milky Way and the deep sky beyond!
We expect to run for a total of 8 sessions every Tuesday starting Apr 28, 2026. Look for a Google Meet schedule links to be available at this page ahead of the workshop start date.
Please bookmark this website for ALL UPDATES. I will try not to send emails or notifications for any updates. All materials will show up here.
Workshop organization & JupyterLab - your own virtual laptop in the sky!
Click here to see Student Intial Star Assignments, Usernames, Status
Click here to read about the BAROSpection workshop Infrastructure
- Access Online OpenStax Astronomy Textbook here
- Complete Project 0.1, 0.2, 0.3: First Login to Jupyter & Slack and other introductory assignments which should be available for you to create your first lines of code in Markdown & Python for this class. I encourage you to click each of the Project Project 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 Notebooks below, login with your username and password as identified in the previous paragraphs. See if you can complete these ahead of our first 2 introductory sessions!
Especially, if you complete Project 0.1 Hand Compute CC we will image your own assigned star LIVE v1a the BARO telescope on the night of the first class session!
Dropbox link and instructions for access to Spectral Images
Click Dropbox Link here for access to Images
- You do not need a Dropbox accout to access images!
- Click the link above. It will open in your default browser.
- First click down to the “Images” Folder. In the Browser. You will have choices to download
- Click down to your “star folder” under “Images” folder. Then Download your specific “Star” folder or some other “Star” folder. You will get a zip file which you can extract on your system.
- Download the entire “Images” Folder. You will get a zip file which you can extract on your system. Be warned - this is several GB and wmight take a very long time. Although we may not exceed this limit, Dropbox will prevent you from downloading more than 20GB
Intro to Spectroscopy Presentation Content
References for creating your descriptions about your calibration and assigned stars
Intro to Spectroscopy Notebook Assignments
| Project | Topics | Notebook | Due Date | Partial Solution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.0. | First Access to Slack - Introduce yourself with a short background saying hello to your fellow participants | Slack | BEFORE Apr 28th |
None |
| 0.1. | Hand compute celestial coordinates for your assigned star using Notebook. Make a contribution to Slack about an interesting fact about your assigned star using wikipedia! | Hand Compute CC Wiki Search Notebook | BEFORE Apr 28th |
Solution CSV Download - Verify your answers |
| 0.2. | What is JupyterLab - Jupyter Notebooks - Learn Basics | Intro to Jupyter | May 5th | View Only |
| 1. | Introduction to coding Python inside JupyterLab | Intro to Python Part 1 | May 5th | View Only |
| 2. | Install the RSpec Application on your Windows system for analysis of your star spectra. Please include word “BAROspection” in the form for download | RSpec download & Install | May 5th | None |
| 3a. | Compute Celestial Coordinates to obtain Live Spectra of Type A stars for calibration | Celestial Coordinates | May 5th | View Only |
| 3b. | RSpec Spectral Analysis | RSpec Analysis of your Star Assignment Instructions | May 5th | None |
| 4. | Identification of Star Types from Spectra | Mystery Star & HRD Project Assignment | May 12th & May 19th | None |
| 5a. | Calculate Temperature of your star using Wein’s law & build Instrument Response Curve | Star temperature & Instrument Response | June 2 | View Only |
| 5b. | Identify Spectral lines in your Instrument Corrected Spectrum by using the Walker Spectroscopic Atlas | RSpec Image of your Star showing Identified Spectral Lines | June 2 | View Only |
| 6. | Open Cluster HRD Project Notebook | Plot & Study first HRD for an Open Cluster | Jun 9th | None |
| 7. | Final HRD Project Notebook | Create Final HRD plot using Student Stars with Spectral Types Determined | Jun 9th | None |