Most spectrometer systems today come as self-contained ready-to-use commercial packages. As such, their basic design considerations and fine-tuning methods have mostly become lost to the scientific community at large. Little literature on the design and alignment exist and what there is are difficult to find.
The refurbishment and modernization of a 4.8-meter spectroheliograph presents an opportunity to study and rediscover the fundamental details behind the proper operation of the instrument — a non-trivial task given that the instrument has been idle for the last 10 years and has no documentation to be had. The whole system had to be taken apart, reverse-engineered, and then re-assembled.
[Presented at the Samahang Pisika ng Pilipinas (SPP) Congress, 1999.]