Qualitative demonstration of how salts of various metals—sodium, lithium, potassium, calcium, strontium, barium, and copper—emit characteristic colors when burned in a flame. We can analyze the component colors by placing a 500 lines/cm diffraction film in front of the camera lens. Notice that some elements are mostly monochromatic (sodium, for example) while others emit a range of colors (calcium, etc). A slightly more quantitative analysis would incorporate a slit between the flame and the diffraction grating to make the profiles of the emissions narrower and more precise.
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