Borrow a diffraction grating from your physics instructor. The common kind looks like a photographic slide, and light passing through it or reflecting from it is diffracted into its component colors by thousands of finely ruled lines. Look through the grating at the light from a sodium-vapor street lamp. If it’s a low-pressure lamp, you’ll see the nice yellow spectral “line” that dominates sodium light (actually, it’s two closely spaced lines). If the street lamp is round, you’ll see circles instead of
lines; if you look through a slit cut in cardboard or some similar material, you’ll see lines. What happens with the now common high-pressure sodium lamps is more interesting. Because of the collisions of excited atoms, you’ll see a smeared-out spectrum that is nearly continuous, almost like that of an incandescent lamp. Right at the yellow location, where you’d expect to see the sodium
line, is a dark area. This is the sodium absorption band. It is due to the cooler sodium, which surrounds the high-pressure emission region. You should view this a block or so away so that the line, or circle, is small enough to allow the resolution to be maintained. Try this. It is very easy to see!