LV Sketchbook Page 010

Like several of my recent pieces, LV Sketchbook Page 010 is inspired by the formal qualities of indexical data. This composition references the optical spectrum of the sun and its spectral lines of varying colors. The dark areas are known as Fraunhofer lines, named after the German physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) who detected 574 of them, vastly more than his predecessors. It is now known that Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum are caused by absorption by chemical elements in the solar atmosphere as well as by molecules in the Earth's atmosphere.

Many scientific telescopes have spectrographs whose photon measurements are used in a variety of contexts. In Antarctica, it’s frequently used to study the relationship between atmospheric ozone depletion and aerosol particle concentration as well as the behavior of winds and temperatures derived from observations of the airglow from atomic oxygen.

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