All right, you primitive screwheads, listen up! This is now day two of trying to build a spectroscope. Back in dath ilan, any startup that took two days to build a prototype of anything would be shut down by its funders as clearly hopeless.
Keltham was specifically hoping to have a spectroscope on hand while evaluating hiring and tiering, so he could see who was making the most progress at learning to shift the electron-orbital behavior of materials using Prestidigitation of color-taste-smell-stickiness.
Their present situation may be summarized as follows:
They don't have a professional glassmaker on-site, nor on-site glassmaking equipment to build a prism out of optical glass. Specifying and ordering a prism from off-site would probably take several days and probably not be quite right on arrival.
They have a large piece of cloudy quartz that was successfully Stone-Shaped into the right rough shape of a prism, and then further cut flat with overkill magical slicing spells.
Despite Prestidigitation supposedly being able to change the color of things, Keltham has not been able to clear this quartz in a way that makes it suitable for use in a spectroscope's prism, nor change the flat surface of it into a diffraction grating.
They have a tiny piece of nice clear quartz that would, if it were larger, probably work to build a spectroscope.
Keltham's plan is therefore as follows:
Step one, use their spectroscope to burn the piece of clear quartz and get a reading from the spectral lines off that.
Step two, other people will practice Prestidigitating bits of cloudy quartz 'clearer', burning those under their spectroscope, and trying to shift the radiance-absorption lines of cloudy quartz towards being entirely the dominant spectrographic lines recorded from the clear quartz.
Step three, Prestidigitate their large shaped piece of quartz clear, and use it to build their first spectroscope.