Capstone includes a very powerful video analysis feature which can be used for comprehensive analysis of moving objects as well as to improve understanding.  Short video clips from your smartphone can be easily imported and analysed with a range of tools.  The movement of objects with a high contrast to a uniform background can be automatically tracked by the software.

A ball will be thrown in a parabolic arc and various tools will be used to analyze the motion.  Note that the vertical and horizontal axes have been marked and a distance of 4.00 m has been measured.  This will enable the software to translate from pixels to m:

As part of the analysis, the position of the ball in each frame is marked and the result is as shown below:

It is now possible to have the software generate various graphs such as position vs time and velocity vs time.

A graph of vertical position vs time is as shown below:

A graph of horizontal position vs time yields the following:

A graph of the vertical component of velocity vs time yields the following result:

Capstone also includes tools that improve understanding.  For example, in the screen below, the vertical and horizontal components of velocity are shown for the ball as it flies through the air.

To make the display less cluttered and less confusing it is possible to mark the vectors at an interval other than every frame.  Below the vectors are shown every third frame:

It is also possible to have a single vertical vector and a single horizontal vector appear and move with the ball as it goes through the air.

It is also possible to show the acceleration vector as shown below:

The fact that a few vectors do not point directly down is likely due to minor errors made when marking the position of the ball in various frames with a mouse.

Session 1

• What’s New:
  • Smart Cart Demo Kit:
    • Motor Drive
    • Fan + Sail
    • Vector Display

Session 2

• Mini Projectile launcher w/smart gate with air resistance (Blockly)
• Projectile Launcher with Drop Shoot Accessory

Session 3

• Faraday’s Law & Ring Launcher

Session 4

• Diffraction Scanner

Session 5: Cool Physics Demos

• Coupled Oscillators Smart Cart (FFT) & Friction Block+PAScar
• Inertia Wands
• Atmospheric pressure Demos
• Polarizer Demo / Color Mixer / Color Mixer Accessory
• Genecon Hand Crank Generator Coil & cow magnet on a spring
• Eddy Currents – magnetic braking
• Mirror pendulum demo

Similar to many scientific concepts, spectroscopy developed as a result of the cumulative work of many scientists over many decades. Generally, Sir Isaac Newton is credited with the discovery of spectroscopy, but his work wouldn’t have been possible without the discoveries made by others before him. Newton’s optics experiments, which were conducted from 1666 to 1672, were built on foundations created by Athanasius Kircher (1646), Jan Marek Marci (1648), Robert Boyle (1664), and Francesco Maria Grimaldi (1665). In his theoretical explanation, “Optics,” Newton described prism experiments that split white light into colored components, which he named the “spectrum.” Newton’s prism experiments were pivotal in the discovery of spectroscopy, but the first spectrometer wasn’t created until 1802 when William Hyde Wollaston improved upon Newton’s model.

William Hyde Wollaston’s spectrometer included a lens that focused the Sun’s spectrum on a screen. He quickly noticed that the spectrum was missing sections of color. Even more troublesome, the gaps were inconsistent. Wollaston claimed these lines to be natural boundaries between the colors, but this hypothesis was later corrected by Joseph von Fraunhofer in 1815.

Joseph von Fraunhofer’s experiments replaced Newton’s prism with a diffraction grating to serve as the source of wavelength dispersion. Based on the theories of light interference developed by François Arago, Augustin-Jean Fresnel, and Thomas Young, Fraunhofer’s experiments featured an improved spectral resolution and demonstrated the effect of light passing through a single rectangular slit, two slits, and multiple, closely spaced slits. Fraunhofer’s experiments allowed him to quantify the dispersed wavelengths created by his diffraction grating. Today, the dark bands Fraunhofer observed and their specific wavelengths are still referred to as Fraunhofer lines.

Throughout the mid 1800’s, scientists began to make important connections between emission spectra and absorption and emission lines. Among these scientists were Swedish physicist Anders Jonas Ångström, George Stokes, David Atler, and William Thomson (Kelvin). In the 1860’s, Bunsen and Kirchhoff discovered that Fraunhofer lines correspond to emission spectral lines observed in laboratory light sources. Using systematic observations and detailed spectral examinations, they became the first to establish links between chemical elements and their unique spectral patterns.

It took many decades and more than a dozen scientists for spectroscopy to be well understood, and most modern models weren’t developed until the 1900’s. Today, there are physicists, biologists, and chemists using spectroscopy in their day-to-day lives. For more information, visit our in-depth guide, What is Spectroscopy? or check out our other blog post, “What is the Difference Between Spectroscopy and Microscopy?”