AAPT Photo Contest: Refraction of Regular Light

For my photo for the AAPT photo contest, I took a prism and an LED flashlight in a dark room, and used them both to create a beautiful, for the lack of a better term, array of light. Since I used an LED flashlight, the prism couldn't show the different colors of waves that make up the one light (i.e. the color spectrum of a rainbow). Had the sun been out and bright enough on the day I was doing all of this, I would've been able to use the sun's light and get a broad spectrum of colors.



The different angles of the glass prism make the light reflect in different ways. The light enters the prism, going from one medium to another (air to glass) which then causes it to slow down or speed up (in the case, slow down) and refract in a different direction. The incident angle (the angle in which the light source was directed at the prism) was the reason as to why the light was refracted the way it was. If I had placed the light source lower, higher, more to the right, or more to the left, I would have gotten different outcomes. Here are pictures of the prism I used, and the outcome when I shined the LED flashlight through it.

The third photo (of the refracted light) may seem a little blurry but if you look carefully, it is not. The distortion of the light and everything just isn't perfectly clear because the light source wasn't perfectly aligned, therefore the glass on one side of the prism and the glass on the other create slightly different angled light.