Yes, the equipment required is indeed very basic: a diffraction grating, a camera and a tripod. It just so happens that the 1.25" Baader Blazed Grating is an excellent match for my Canon 100mm lens. The blazing puts much of the diffracted light into the first order spectrum (hence bright), and the number of lines/mm spreads the spectrum very nicely onto the frame of a Canon 1.6x crop DSLR. You get both the zero order (convenient for wavelength identification/calibration) and the whole first order spectrum within the frame, to 10,000 Angstroms (or whatever your DSLR can record, depending on what you have over the sensor; stock Canon IR Blocker, rectangular passband UV/IR Blocker, or clear glass). Thus the full spectrum from just under 4000 Angstroms all the way up to 10,000 Angstroms is captured in one go, at a convenient dispersion of about 3 Angstroms per pixel in a 20D. The latter of course depends on the pixel pitch of the DSLR; a modestly-priced Canon 550D would have a finer dispersion, around 2 Angstroms per pixel. Actual spectral resolution will of course depend on how good was your focusing, how good was your lens and how carefully you aligned everything up. Fortunately, it does not matter a hoot as regards how well your tracking was, like in most astrophotography. The camera is fixed, :-) so just make sure you use mirror pre-release to minimise vibrations. On Canon DSLRs autofocus also works excellently on any bright star or planet with any lens longer than or equal to 100mm focal length. Doubling the focal length of the lens would make the dispersion twice as fine, but then you cannot include the zero order in the same frame, and the image would be dimmer. A focal length of around 100mm seems "just about right" for a crop DSLR. The Canon lenscap (with a hole drilled in it) is actually more convenient than a more rigid mating of the grating to the lens. The 1.25" ring easily screws into the soft plastic (no threading is needed) and because the lenscap is spring loaded, you can turn it into any orientation and it stays there. For accuracy and convenience it is best to orient the grating so that the spectrum is spread out along the base (horizontal axis) of the frame. The lens' rotating collar facilitates a very convenient means of orienting the trailing of a star to then be vertical within the frame, i.e. orthogonal to the spectrum. Amusing that for this snapshooting method to work well we actually want the stars to trail, thus a fixed tripod. Anyway, as we will see, we do not need to be overly obsessed with either the spectrum being dead parallel to the camera's base, nor the trailing to be dead orthogonal. Either can be fixed in an image editor during post processing, the trailing turning out to be of great help! Consequently a ball-head should also work great. Ah, I also found it useful to use a lenshood to keep out my neighbours' lights from washing out my spectra.