Theory - Blackbody Spectrum Viewer

Application

Blackbody Radiation is the light given off by an object due to its temperature. For the data fitting software, conversions must be made between apparent magnitude in a given bandpass filter and the intensity of light predicted by blackbody radiation.

Algorithm

This viewer starts by taking a range of frequencies and plotting them on a graph. It then determines two other views. First, it plots each frequency at a different color and brightness, interpolating against known values. The actual observed color of a hot object can be difficult to compute. In this case, we simply start with observed colors associated with given temperatures, and interpolate to determine what color to show on the screen.

For the data fitting tool, a chi-squared value is used to measure goodness of fit.

Architecture

The Blackbody Spectrum Viewer and the Blackbody Data Fitting Tool are both Java applets.