Fwd: DIY spectrometer follow-up
Jeffrey Warren
Hey all... adam is writing a piece on our spectrometry work for popular mechanics and needs some good spectra and other images. If anyone who's taking spectra is interested please reply all. A great opportunity to get some new contributors and visibility for our work!
Deadline next Friday!
Jeff
From: "Adam Hadhazy" <adamh...@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 27, 2012 3:48 PM
Subject: DIY spectrometer follow-up
To: "Jeffrey Warren" <je...@publiclaboratory.org>
Cc: <JBeil...@hearst.com>
Hi Jeff,
Hope you've had a good week! I've been working on the PopMech article about DIY Spectrometry and I wanted to link you up with the magazine's art department, who will likely be contacting you. (I've cc'd Jerry from PopMech on here who will pass your info on to them.)
For the article, we thought it would be cool to briefly describe the 5 or so household examples of DIY spectrometry using the Public Lab spectrometer and Spectral Workbench software, and to provide a small image of what the associated spectra looks like. I had planned on generating some of the spectra myself, but I'm having trouble with my spectrometer getting anywhere near as clean a spectrum as you and other Public Lab users – sorry! The five examples we are going with right now are listed below.
Could I ask you the two favors of 1) forwarding us a few
nice big jpeg or png files of certain spectra glimpsed in videos on Public Lab?
And 2) could you record spectra for some light examples and the Sun, as
described with the examples below? There already are examples on Public Lab for
the laundry detergent and the modified aquarium LED lamp, and I have supplied those
links.
Laundry Detergent
Image already available on the Public Lab site: http://spectralworkbench.org/system/photos/219/large/type%20to%20label%20next%20spectrum.png
Aquarium Lighting
Image: http://spectralworkbench.org/spectra/show/151
Lights
A fluorescent lamp for calibration with the distinctive spectral lines, e.g. the mercury line at 546 nanometers, would be great. There are some examples of this I believe on Public Lab. We'd also like a high-pressure sodium lamp street light example, which apparently has a distinctive bright yellow line at 589 nanometers, as shown in this link: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~zhuxj/astro/html/spectrometer.html Other easy-to-obtain light examples with interesting spectral features would work too, if the sodium lamps aren't handy.
The Sun
Again, the cs.cmu.edu link above provides nice examples of what sunlight spectra look like when sampled at different times of the day. Could you please do a Sun shot for us?
Olive oil
You have the video online of your olive oil tests – could you hook us up with a big image of one of those sample spectra? Here's the link to the olive oil page:
http://publiclaboratory.org/notes/warren/7-2-2012/matching-olive-oil-spectra-spectralworkbench
OK, hope this makes sense. Basically we just want to have a spectra image for each example. I'm out of town next week so could you please wrangle the lamp and Sun spectra, plus the olive oil spectra pics, before 8/6 or so?
Thank you very much for your help with this, Jeff!
Cheers,
Adam