One of my eventual amateur astronomy goals is to venture into the colourful world of spectroscopy. Today I took my first steps on that path.

We have a small cut glass pendant hanging in our window which casts pretty rainbows around the living room in the evening sun. A while ago I took photo of one of these with the intention of one day seeing what data could be extracted from it.

Not much to look at, but I decided tonight to see how much information can be extracted from this humble image.

First step was to massage the file into FITS format, the standard for astronomical data, with the hope that I could use some standard tools on the resulting file.

I cropped the rainbow, converted it to grayscale, and saved it as FITS in Gimp. I’d hoped to use my usual swiss army knife for FITS files, SAOImage DS9, to extract a graph from the resulting file, but no dice. Instead I used the following Python script to plot a graph of the averages brightness values of the columns of pixels across the spectrum. Averaging the vertical columns of pixels helps cancel out the effects of noise in the source image.

# spectraplot.py
import pyfits
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import sys

hdulist = pyfits.open(sys.argv[1])
# Grab the mean value of each column in the image
mean_data = hdulist[0].data.mean(axis=0)

plt.plot(mean_data)
plt.show()

Here’s the resulting graph, with the cropped colour and grayscale spectra added for context.

If you weren’t asleep during high school physics class, you may recognise the tell tale shape of a black body radiation curve.

From the image above we can see that the Sun’s peak intensity is actually in green light, not yellow as we perceive it. But better still we can (roughly!) measure the surface temperature of the Sun using this curve.

Here’s a graph of colour vs wavelength.

I estimate the wavelength of the green in the peak of the graph above to be about 510nm. With this figure the Sun’s surface temperature can be calculated using Wien’s displacement law.

λmax * T = b

This simple equation says that the peak frequency (λmax) of the black body curve times the temperature (T) is a constant, b, called Wien’s displacement constant. We can rearrange the equation …

T = b / λmax

… and then plug in the value of b to get the surface temperature of the Sun in degrees Kelvin.

T = 2,897,768 / 510 = 5681 K

That’s close enough to the actual value of 5780 K for me!

I’m pretty encouraged by this result with nothing more than a piece of glass and a basic digital camera. A huge amount of what we know about the cosmos comes from examining spectra, but it’s a field that doesn’t get much love from amateur astronomers. Stay tuned for some hopefully more refined experiments in future.

As a long time Vim user, I have the following config in my ~/.vimrc to ensure I never ever enter an evil tab character into my source code.

set   shiftwidth=2
set   tabstop=2
set   smarttab
set   et

For my Android projects, I’m starting to use Eclipse, and unfortunately eternally banishing all tabs in Eclipse is not such an easy task. Here’s where I’m at so far, YMMV and I’ll update this as I find more. It seems the tab boss is difficult to kill in this app.

• Under Window -> Preferences -> General -> Editors -> Text Editors ensure Insert spaces for tabs is checked.
• Under Window -> Preferences -> Java -> Code Style -> Formatter create a new profile based off the default, and under the Indentation tab set Tab policy to to Spaces only.

There are a raft of tools out there for secure storage of passwords, but they will all come and go, Vim and GnuPG are forever.

Here’s the config:

augroup encrypted
    au!

    " First make sure nothing is written to ~/.viminfo while editing
    " an encrypted file.
    autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre      *.gpg set viminfo=
    " We don't want a swap file, as it writes unencrypted data to disk
    autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre      *.gpg set noswapfile
    " Switch to binary mode to read the encrypted file
    autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre      *.gpg set bin
    autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre      *.gpg let ch_save = &ch|set ch=2
    autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost    *.gpg '[,']!gpg --decrypt 2> /dev/null
    " Switch to normal mode for editing
    autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost    *.gpg set nobin
    autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost    *.gpg let &ch = ch_save|unlet ch_save
    autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost    *.gpg execute ":doautocmd BufReadPost " . expand("%:r")

    " Convert all text to encrypted text before writing
    autocmd BufWritePre,FileWritePre    *.gpg   '[,']!gpg --default-recipient-self -ae 2>/dev/null
    " Undo the encryption so we are back in the normal text, directly
    " after the file has been written.
    autocmd BufWritePost,FileWritePost  *.gpg   u

    " Fold entries by default
    autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre      *.gpg set foldmethod=expr
    autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre      *.gpg set foldexpr=getline(v:lnum)=~'^\\s*$'&&getline(v:lnum+1)=~'\\S'?'<1':1
augroup END

Now, open a file, say super_secret_passwords.gpg and enter your passwords with a blank line between each set:

My Twitter account
malc : s3cr3t

My Facebook account
malc : s3cr3t

My LinkedIn account
malc : s3cr3t

When you write the file out, it will be encrypted with your GPG key. When you next open it, you’ll be prompted for your GPG private key passphrase to decrypt the file.

The line folding config will mean all the passwords will be hidden by default when you open the file, you can reveal the details using zo (or right arrow / l) with the cursor over the password title.

I like this system because as long as I have gpg and my private key available, I can extract any long lost password from my collection.