PASSBAND INFRARED INSTRUMENT WORKSHOP

Keep the faint light.

Open three wavelength windows and choose an exposure. Collect enough light from a cool world while keeping the bright foreground below your detector’s saturation limit. Read the gold target and purple foreground rates before selecting.

Build your filter

Each window spans 1 μm. Toggle any three; adjacent windows may touch.

Gold bar / target · violet bar / foreground · height uses a common logarithmic scale

Exposure

Cool world behind a glowing thermal foreground

DETECTOR CLOSED

Selected windows
Target signal: —
Foreground: —
Signal / noise: —
Detector load: —

Choose three bins, then expose. Longer exposures improve counting statistics until saturation.

Physics, units and source

Blackbody spectral radiance Bν uses the scalar Astropy BlackBody equation in SI units. Each 1μm band is converted to frequency bounds and integrated as photon radiance Bν/(hν). Displayed counts use fictional collecting-area factors and a15-count read-noise term. The scene is a generated illustration whose visibility responds to signal fraction; it is not a reconstructed telescope image. Educational instrument model, not observing advice.

Astropy Developers, BSD-3-Clause; pinned d3ad3b66. Original local puzzle and UI; source and license bundled.