What’s a spectrophotometer?

Last week at open house we had a great surprise, one of our guests brought this fantastic piece of medical equipment, which we thought was a mass spectrometer. We ooohed and aaahed and played with the knobs but didn’t do much otherwise. Last night another new guest stopped by and started to dig a little deeper. With the help of the handy internet (wikipedia especially) he found out the machine is actually a spectrophotometer, and then he found the manual! It offers helpful advice on how to “get the most from your Stasar” and tells us that we should “Read carefully, believe in what it tells you, and you can expect long and faithful service from your Stasar.” Our new guest posted a summary of what he found as a discussion on our google group (thanks again Rob!) Take a look, add a comment, or stop by next week to see what else we can figure out!