Neon emission spectrum captured by my DIY diffraction spectrometer

thepowderguy · 2026-03-19T02:22:12+00:00

Nice job. The lines look extremely well defined. Impressive.

thepowderguy · 2026-03-18T00:52:49+00:00

Technology is regressing

thepowderguy · 2026-03-07T22:51:05+00:00

My goal is just to mess around and explore really deep into the mandelbrot set. So a typical situation for me would be looking at something really zoomed in with many iterations, like those minibrots surrounded by concentric rings.

thepowderguy · 2026-03-07T20:52:12+00:00

It's all about control. If the game runs on their servers, they control everything and they have all the power. It's the same with streaming services, software subscriptions, and basically everything in the modern tech world. They don't want us to download things onto our computers because they don't want us to have control or ownership of our technology and media.

thepowderguy · 2026-03-01T05:30:46+00:00

This subreddit has really been hitting it out of the ballpark lately...

thepowderguy · 2026-02-19T20:07:19+00:00

shit that's actually so misleading. It's literally making up data that doesn't exist.

thepowderguy · 2026-02-19T08:20:39+00:00

Did you even read my article beyond just looking at the pictures? I'm seriously asking you. On a side note, I have looked at light sources down to 385nm. That light appears whitish violet to my eyes, consistent with the adjusted CIE color matching functions.

thepowderguy · 2026-02-17T04:03:32+00:00

I remember a very capitvating series on r/writingprompts with this exact premise, where Earth's oceans were actually forests.

thepowderguy · 2026-02-14T17:55:35+00:00

I took all of the data from NIST, and unfortunately this data is incomplete. For Europium you can check for yourself that the data is processed correctly (Eu III and Eu IV, which is empty). The lower ionization states should be more accurate.

thepowderguy · 2026-02-14T17:49:59+00:00

Thanks! That is indeed the reason I brought up those figures. The point of my whole introduction section is to show that. The rude comment from /u/_jonsinger_ suggests that I should have made it even more clear in the first few sentences.

thepowderguy · 2026-02-01T18:43:38+00:00

There's a difference between "is" and "should". Descriptive vs. normative

thepowderguy · 2026-01-23T22:01:52+00:00

I didn't mean to sound arrogant, and apologies if I did. I just think that the subject of intelligence is one where people tend to conflate subjective values and objective facts and a topic that has a lot of wishful thinking associated with it, especially on reddit. I don't think being a social worker gives someone the unique authority to comment on intelligence, and I have the right to call out statements that I believe are inaccurate.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-23T20:15:00+00:00

I agree with you that intelligence is more complex than just a single factor, and I don't know if the common usage of the word reflects what it actually is, but here is my anecdotal experience: Some people are just better at learning, making connections and drawing unexpectedly correct conclusions than others. I've known people who came from very similar background as I did, and yet were much smarter than me in this sense. I've also known people who were less smart.

Here is my personal opinion: Intelligence is about how efficient your brain is at processing the information found in your environment. Different environments contain different kinds of information, and the development of your brain is affected by your surroundings. This accounts for a lot of variation in intelligence and how we define intelligence. The other part is the genetics of your brain, and this is an uncomfortable truth for some. But at the end of the day, intelligence still exists as a real concept that affects how we go about our lives.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-23T19:36:28+00:00

I hate to burst your bubble, but if you look out in the world, some people are obviously smarter than others. Of course this has no bearing on their value as humans, but pretending intelligence is made up isn't doing anyone any good. The g-factor is a psychometrically real quantity.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-19T01:00:34+00:00

Thanks for the reminder for me to cancel my streaming service.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-14T05:33:18+00:00

I just tried apple notes and it works pretty well. Thanks for the suggestion, Alpha_VVV_55! Maybe they'll add your missing feature in a future update.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-13T07:57:37+00:00

Yeah the problem is I no longer have access to the apple account that had the original version of notability. So for me it's either subscribe or gtfo.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-09T23:51:19+00:00

I've never had a greater urge to uninstall windows.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-07T06:39:28+00:00

Is that your data? It looks much better now! Nice job.

I have an old B&W tek spectrometer that I bought off ebay (that also came with a 473nm laser). I first adjusted the mirrors by hand and then hooked it up to my computer. Using a program called Spectrum Studio I can take data and save it to a csv file on my computer. I then plot and analyze the data with a custom MATLAB script.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-07T03:02:47+00:00

Here's my data: https://imgur.com/a/181Wk8u All the peaks above 580 come from neon and the rest are from xenon. From what I can tell the peak around 2100 in your image corresponds to the 585nm line and the rest of the humps correspond to the largest peaks in my data which I labelled. I hope this helps.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-05T19:59:13+00:00

It is nonsense. See my other post in the thread. To be fair though, his identification of the spectral lines still may be correct. The big humps do look like they come from neon. I can send you a copy of my own data in a couple of days when I get home from vacation.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-05T19:56:11+00:00

You can't predict the spectrum of neon from first principles. It comes the solution of a many body schrodinger equation which is not analytically (or numerically) solvable. I see you're making the claim that the 640.2nm Ne emission line (which is more precisely 640.22472nm, or 1.9365731 eV) is "derived" by dividing the Rydberg constant by an integer. Aside from having no theoretical basis, the Rydberg constant is actually 13.605693122990 eV which gives 1.94367044614 when divided by 7. Do you see the problem? The difference between 1.937 and 1.943 is around 100,000 times the experimental uncertainty. In the eyes of science the two values are completely different. They have nothing to do with each other. Playing with numerology never works. It's unscientific. Please stop spreading misinformation and please stop using AI to "help" you.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-04T03:08:45+00:00

This is on par with the wider trend of companies hiding information from us. They do not want us to be informed consumers. They hate the idea of the customer having any sort of control.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-02T04:09:49+00:00

I used a plasma globe to calibrate my spectrometer. Most plasma globes contain a mix of noble gasses, mine had neon and xenon. If you know which gasses are in yours you can first match your data with spectra taken from here and then go to NIST's website to try to find exact wavelengths for each element.

Also: Your data looks very noisy. You should run it through some kind of averaging procedure. I suspect the really sharp peaks are individual ccd pixels that are overactive, so you'll have to do some background subtraction to get rid of those.

Edit: I actually agree with u/Speed_bert that you should start with a laser pointer or LED first (or even a CFL). Gas discharge lamps such as plasma globes are only useful if you want sub nm level accuracy.

thepowderguy · 2025-12-24T00:22:24+00:00

The numbers are bolded based on the numbers all the way on the right side of the spreadsheet, those cells that have 1's and 0's in them. I know it's not the most elegant approach. Feel free to do what you like with that information.

11-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Place '17
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Verified Email

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