From: Ralph Megna <ralph@macastronomy.com>

Date: April 20, 2011 3:09:12 PM MDT

To: <Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com>

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Spectroscopy

Milton,

I've been reading the posts in the other forum, but time hasn't permitted me to jump in.

My two cents:

I would LOVE an application that did spectroscopic data reduction on the Mac. And for what it is worth, I think there would be some significant interest in the academic community where at least 60% of all professional astronomers use Macs. Whether people would use it, and how much they would pay for it, is entirely dependent on its feature set and marketing.

If it were me, I'd seek the involvement of Oliver Thizy of Shelyak - he's building/selling spectrographs and I am sure he gets Mac inquiries. I will be seeing Olivier at the SAS meeting next month and would be happy to talk to him about it.

Also, there is an astronomical spectroscopy group on Yahoo (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/astronomical_spectroscopy/) that, of late, has been very active. That is another forum for exploring the interest in a Mac application, especially in connection with the Spectra-L200 device that was built and sold through the forum.

The other possibility are folks who are using industrial/scientific cameras in spectrographic applications - material quality control, environmental monitoring, lab experiments, etc. An application that combined camera operation with real-time spectrographic results might have buyers.

All that said, you are absolutely right about the tiny size of the market for this application. The number of amateurs doing serious/semi-serious spectroscopy is small to begin with; the ones with Mac, at best, are just 10-20% of that number. If there is any hope for Mac software sales in this arena, it would be among academics or those doing process analysis.

If I think of anything else, I will send it your way.

Ralph

From: milton_aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Reply-To: <Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com>

Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:01:10 -0000

To: <Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com>

Subject: [Astro_IIDC] Spectroscopy

Hi Folks;

I have had a couple of people on another list interested in adding Spectroscopy to Astro IIDC.

You can pick up some relatively inexpensive Grating for < $250 like:

http://www.shelyak.com/?lang=2

http://www.rspec-astro.com/sa100/

The curve extraction / processing end is reasonably straight forward, although it is a fair bit of work to implement all of it (i.e. background sky subtraction, conversion of pixel to frequency based on known peak or absorption lines etc. etc.).

So I'm wondering if this is a feature people might use or not?

Thanks in advance..

Milton Aupperle