If you’re worried that [Roman Dvořák]’s spectroscopic analysis of fireworks is going to ruin New Year’s Eve or the Fourth of July, relax — the science of this build only adds to the fun.
Not that there’s nothing to worry about with fireworks, of course; there are plenty of nasty chemicals in there, and we can say from first-hand experience that getting hit in the face and chest with shrapnel from a shell is an unpleasant experience. [Roman]’s goal with this experiment is pretty simple: to see if it’s possible to cobble together a spectrograph to identify the elements that light up the sky during a pyrotechnic display. The camera rig was mainly assembled from readily available gear, including a Chronos monochrome high-speed camera and a 500-mm telescopic lens. A 100 line/mm grating was attached between the lens and the camera, a finding scope was attached, and the whole thing went onto a sturdy tripod.
From a perch above Prague on New Year’s Eve, [Roman] collected a ton of images in RAW12 format. The files were converted to TIFFs by a Python script and converted to video by FFmpeg. Frames with good spectra were selected for analysis using a Jupyter Notebook project. Spectra were selected by moving the cursor across the image using slider controls, converting pixel positions into wavelengths.
There are some optical improvements [Roman] would like to make, especially in aiming and focusing the camera; as he says, the dynamic and unpredictable nature of fireworks makes them difficult to photograph. As for identifying elements in the spectra, that’s on the to-do list until he can find a library of spectra to use. Or, there’s always DIY Raman spectroscopy.
“New Year’s Eve or the Fourth of July”
No mention of Bonfire Night aka Fifth of November, Guy Fawkes’ Night or Fireworks Night?
I’ve been tempted to script something totdownload the lines for each element from somewhere like https://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/ASD/lines_form.html
What a marvellous idea and execution.
Dan – I’m not sure if you have personal email or a way to speak to you directly but you have made several comments about one of my projects and man’y of my comments themselves. One you said, “way ahead of the curve and that you looked forward to seeing it progress. Well it has but not enough for me to publish regular updates. I sm an Auto taught novice engineer, cybersecurity researcher, and RF engineer. I have a M.P.H. and J.D. but started out reading everything from Plato to everyone in-between up to contemporary ethicists and I made a recommendation to MITTRE to do a retro social and demographic analysis of CVEs to hopefully show the value of the independent,.teams, or acidemic “ethcial hackers” or as some.prefer “cybersecurity researchers” as the word as we all know it here is far far different from the real meaning used as it is in the current media which wrong and misleading. I wanted to highlight the role and contributions made by “ethcial hackers” to the overall internet security and privacy both on the network, software, firmware,.and the hardware based vulnerabilities and attack vectors.
I wanted to thank you so much for your encouraging comments and I am recovering from Severe Complex PTSD (combat related,) and yes a lawyer can be exposed to combat related injuries and are often times seen by their own government as disposable. ..
I am still working on my portable statalight ground station with very cutting edge tech including but not limited to Sig53, SigTourch, a self positioning mount for two yagis ,(ish and vhf as well as a center placed dish for up to 13-14 GHz and a fixed portable expanding sets of larger dishs. It is my wish to build them into very light and to be able to carry everything in a custom tear drop trailer with a solar panel,.some.extrs roll out additional power banks and s smallish wind turbine that can operate unextended while I bike on an ebike and can be raised as well as several other antenna poles built into the structure. The auto tracking mount could sit on top of my tear drop or be placed on a very sturdy, tied down.trilod should the reception and the horizon be better from a slightly different location than where I’m parked so that I can position it in the most ideal spot for wherever I may be and even raise it up higher to get above ground clutter and shrubs. But living in the Ober Bernesese Alps should be very nice both for sat work and study as well as astrophotography. The portability offered by a tear drop trailer and a e-bike with multiple recharge options. I could ever add a “faux axel” with a set of gears turning a alternator for the long trips down the long alpine rodes with which a flip is s switch would disengage. It would make my viewing and listen experience very unique give the natural sheilding from SRFI and less light pollution as well as 200 avg days per year of clear skyes as well as low humidity conditions.in the summer and “,mud sessions” (the time in between the full beginning of winter and the full end of winter in the beginning of Summer.
If I had the financing that I am trying but probably unlikely find I even have a fantastic laboratory location identified for rapid prototyping of much needed ways to communicate with satellites and I’ll leave it there because this is where a proprietary idea would come into play.
But my proof of concept was not only just for my own pleasure in my hobby of being able to listen to The satellites and see their telemetry as well as read their scientific data but also to do a little bit of amateur radio telescope radio astronomy as I’m a member of SARA.
I was a highly educated professional both in science with the terminal degree in law and something happened which was absolutely horrible and had to recover from that and learning is my best and most effective healthy defense mechanism and I use in between my therapy sessions where I make progress towards rebuilding my life.
If you have a good day and usually through links and sources I read on pack a day I have taught myself about convolutional neural networks, large language models, fpga’s, all kinds of RF all kinds of circuits and circuit boards and how to understand and do things that I never thought that I would ever understand.. but with my background in global large transaction business which is quite rare the level in which I did it and that the scale meaning having to reconcile the laws of multiple countries in order to make a deal work, without a question I have the business knowledge for a startup but now I’m actually gained a lot of technical knowledge that with the right team of subject matter experts and a little bit of financing we can do some amazing things I believe.
Not to mention the fact that I have a recruiting pool that people would drool over given that the University of Bern, ZTH, and EPFL are the MIT, Caltec and Colorado School of Mines,. European version as they have instruments on every single flying satellite, scientific instrument that’s been shot into space as well as classified DOD projects. I couldn’t ask for a better pool from which to pick subject matter experts and I’ve kind of let it be known that I would like a rectangular structure to begin with so that the people come on board in the beginning or my equals we we start the business as 100% equal in power and holdings. Make decisions democratically and we listen to each other and at the same time contribute are subject matter specialties to every project and it might not be me who’s the team leader of a potential project even though this idea is fine if someone else the subject matter expert I become secondary and deal with what I know.
Give me the fact I’ve been a former government employee has a very high level which required background investigations etc that in and of itself gives me a certain amount of trust dealing with sensitive issues and sensitive technology and that I’m a lawyer means that I have to follow every single one of the rules that applied to businesses but that apply to me as a lawyer because I’m never not a lawyer. That’s one of the particularities about being a multinational International and dual National is that my admission to the seven different Federal us Mars doesn’t go away and you never leave them which is different from how it works here were you leave the Bar when you’re not in private practice so only private practitioners are a member of the Bar Association. I will be and will remain a member of the US Supreme Court for the remainder of my life and those rules of professional responsibility and the rules of ethics will always be applicable and in fact I saw and received specific ethical advice which stated that when I’m here the expectation of anybody that engages with me here is that the rules of Switzerland apply in a conflict and this is incredibly important when you’re talking about Swiss professional secrecy which is the most stringent level secrecy that applies to professionals in all professions. It carries with it civil and criminal liabilities which means in this kind of work I wouldn’t even think a second about never outsourcing a single bit of the work to a lower cost jurisdiction in order to save a buck.
I would want every single person working to be domiciled in this country and I would want every piece of data held in this country on servers that are either ideally on site and I’m not a big fan of the crowd anymore and in many cases for some of this kind of work air gap and anything that transfers between one or the other system is put under a microscope by a subject matter expert in software or firmware whatever the case may be….
I also plan to this year in addition to the current project which I don’t plan on abandoning but it’s really a cost issue I just don’t have the extra money because I’m recovering from this awful disorder which I can completely recover from but it just takes a little time. I’m living on savings and I finally just got a laser cutter and a second 3D printer which has more professional abilities as well as computer that will allow me to install and train a local set a specific use cases llms. I already have started collecting the data sets for each instance because they’re each unique.
I should be able to sell two of them because I could see how they can be extraordinarily useful especially because you have to have very specific education in training that has nothing to do whatsoever with a large language model to even think of the idea of making this one or these. This reminds me of an article I read which said the best training for AI in the future will be a return to Liberal arts which is actually what I had except I had a Philosophy degree I challenge any one of you egotistical big-headed bench scientists to try and perform as well as you did in philosophy because it was tough especially at my school where they placed an emphasis on teaching and every teacher was a PhD you could not hide in the back of the classroom.
But I really loved it I mean I really thought I would go on and get my PhD in philosophy and continue on and teaching and actually I have my dream would be to teach law as it applies to Science and Technology because now those things have melted along with international business because you can’t separate those things at all and ethics because it applies now to all of those things. I’ve worked as a professional bioethicist on National Institutes of Health research on human subjects and I’ve taken special classes to be certified to sit on an IRB or an institutional review board doing research on human subjects as well as the legal counsel.
And all of that has to wait for a moment because I need about six to nine months to finish this and over the past year I have been at all times throughout this year living breathing and learning material from this website and I have begun and have a decent understanding and knowledge KICAD, Security Traces, Secure Trust ICs, FPGA’S, as well as the various RF chips and my favorite manufacturer at the moment is Analog Devices for a number of different things and Microsoft microchip International for their work on secure memory as they seem to be listening and implementing the side channel and glitch attack recommendations from the French team which can all be learned and understood from the last three years of Defcon presentations regarding pico UV laser attacks.
I also am a huge advocate of bridging the Gap between ethical hackers or ethical or cyber security researchers I don’t care which word you use but using ethical hacker is really just not going to do you much good and could really hurt you and people just don’t get it like we do. But bridging the Gap between this group of individuals who are on the good guys side doing good work and have been likely if my research proposal is accurate and my hypothesis sound have been some of the most important and critical behind uncovering and exposing severe CVEs.
Therefore I have started to work on a proposal on a set of global principles to help protect the ethical hackers and independent security researchers as well as get better treatment and a better avenue of communication between governments and law enforcement as well as the companies in question who are directly involved and there should never be a problem if you followed the rules that I’m working on. I would suggest that the Tetra researchers that presented this year did a really good job of a responsible disclosure I would only add that they before they start their research make sure that they harden their own systems to protect against accidental premature disclosure and that they all agree to be on the same page as well as writing down what they’re doing what the goals are why are they why are they why they’re doing it and that they’re doing it with the aim of complying with the responsible disclosure so that not only will the government or anybody who might stumble upon you in the middle of your research be satisfied but that when you do discover something of importance that it gets disclosed not only to the company who could take forever as we know to patch it or if you do it jointly with the respectful treatment from law enforcement of your work and in their case it was 2 years of hard work and they will help you to get a timely resolution as well as a timely payout to have bug bounty which you would deserve and I would almost say that that should be an industry-wide requirement.
Furthermore by doing the right thing, people will know they can trust you and you have now laid down a solid foundation upon which to build a career and really you’ll get paid not only through your own self satisfaction and through the respect of your peers but in terms of getting whatever job you want especially if you find something complex and something that shows that you have an extraordinary understanding of whatever system you’re working on.
And then on the flip side and just never worth going down the dark path taking the big money being dangled in front of your face by these so-called companies which aren’t really companies they’re just merely Incorporated entities that were Incorporated solely for the purpose to entice and even scam unsuspecting young people and people who don’t think things in that way that what they’re doing is in some way legal when it’s not and never will be… You should only disclose it to your cyber security apparatus on the national level and to the companies involved. No questions..
That 20 million or whatever that guy said recently about zero days on apples and Androids sure that money might arrive in your wallet your Bitcoin wallet or your bank account which would be a very bad idea but you may disappear the next day because they don’t want any loose ends and if you think that’s a joke it’s not a joke at all because the people you’re dealing with are evil. Do the right thing get yourself the great job get a good salary I feel good about yourself and the work that you do because people who have this skill and this ability naturally from my point of view are extremely gifted and I wish I had one tenth of what you have naturally because for me I’m having to learn it it’s not easy but I really enjoy it just at this moment in my life I’m not able to afford all the components I would like to be able to afford.
If you disclose one of these things in the right way to the right company and it’s something serious you’ll be able to afford every piece of lab equipment you’ve ever dreamed of! And for me that might only remain a dream but for you that’s a real possibility.
Thanks Dan for the great comments and the awesome writing as well as a true gift at being a science technology educator!
John
Try NIST Atomic spectroscopic database?
Though if it is still being updated a copy of “fireworks principles and practice” will tell you what is (was) used. I found a copy in the public library when i was 10 (long,long,long ago)