Wednesday, May 09, 2007

I split a moon beam

Here’s the last of my CD spectrometer pictures. The following is the full moon.


I’m pretty sure the gap where yellow should be is a result of the detector having a green-red gap, and is not actually in the moonlight.

Eli seemed to be having fun picking mercury spectra out of my various pictures, so I figured I’d give him this to chew on.


And finally, the reason I gave up on this: I know when I’ve been thoroughly outclassed. A teenager in Oklahoma built a Raman spectrometer, at home, on a tiny budget, to win this prize.

Anyone looking for the spectra of various household light sources should check here.

1 comment:

Doctor Pion said...

Nice examples.

The problem with yellow might be an artifact of the use of r,g,b sensors in the digital camera. Like our eyes, it has to figure out yellow from the amount of light that gets through the r and g filters to the sensors.

You might try taking pictures of the same setup with different kinds of cameras to eliminate that variable.