July 2020 Superdraft: Pick A Color!

[Cancer]

3 hours ago, Old Man said:

 

I would have expected you to choose 410nm.

 

Well, with all respect to the late, lamented Joltin' Joe Sinnott, not even he would ink anyone in the CN B-X system Δv=-1 sequence, whose long-wavelength edge is 0-1 bandhead at 4215Å.

[Bazza]

5 hours ago, Old Man said:

 

I would have expected you to choose 410nm.

 

But is it really a colour? 

[L. Marcus]

True, it's more an attitude. 

[Old Man]

Ironically, 410nm is something like a shade of indigo, IIRC. 

[Sociotard]

That's what google told me, along with options for lasers in that wavelength.

 

It couldn't help much with 4215Å. I … I know what an angstrom is? so 421.5 nm. Violet. but then it tried telling me CNBX was a cannabis pharmaceutical company, and that didn't track. A little more refining search terms said it might refer to the a cyanide radical (CN).So I think Cancer was describing a color created by cyanide radicals, with a spectroscopic shape rather than a fixed point on the spectrum, so some violet and mostly ultraviolet.

[csyphrett]

8 hours ago, Pariah said:

 

 

You know, I can never remember what color that dress was when all was said and done.

The fairies kept up their battle until the movie ended.

CES

[Cancer]

6 hours ago, Sociotard said:

That's what google told me, along with options for lasers in that wavelength.

 

It couldn't help much with 4215Å. I … I know what an angstrom is? so 421.5 nm. Violet. but then it tried telling me CNBX was a cannabis pharmaceutical company, and that didn't track. A little more refining search terms said it might refer to the a cyanide radical (CN).So I think Cancer was describing a color created by cyanide radicals, with a spectroscopic shape rather than a fixed point on the spectrum, so some violet and mostly ultraviolet.

 

* Cancer fails his geek-out save *  Unless you have a boatload of SAN points to spare this morning, don't look at this.

 

CN is a free radical commonly seen spectroscopically in the atmospheres of red giant stars and in the interstellar medium, though astronomers almost invariably refer to it as a molecule.  The spectra of diatomic molecules are very rich and are therefore annoyingly complicated, but what you often get are bands of many spectral lines, which are (with molecules involving atoms other than hydrogen) are very closely spaced and get blended together to make asymmetric blocks of wavelength where light is emitted or absorbed. 

 

Many, many sources will do this, but probably the source everyone has seen is a natural gas flame.  A low-resolution spectrum of a flame is here.  The gas flame being mostly methane and ethane burning with oxygen in stages, while ultimately the reactions end up giving you carbon dioxide and water, there's lots of intermediate steps in the combustion process, and some of the energy of combustion comes out in spectral lines of produced by those intermediate-stage burning reactants; for making the blue color of a gas flame, the important ones are diatomic carbon (C₂) and CH, as shown in that figure.  The humps in the spectrum are blends of many hundreds of spectral lines; they are labeled by molecule there. 

 

A diatomic molecule can be treated as having electronic states (like the energy states in an atom), each of which has many vibrational states, and each of those has many rotational states.  The selection rules for what transitions between states are allowed are complicated, but it is common to identify things most broadly by the electronic state transition ("band systems"; e.g. the Swan bands indicated in the linked figure), and within each band system are a number of individual vibrational bands, each of which is made up of many individual spectral lines between particular rotational states.  If you want to know more than sane people would possibly want to know, you'll probably end up reading books by this guy, one of Canada's Nobel laureates.

 

The violet system has the strongest bands (brightest, for a source of emission lines like a flame) for the CN molecule.  (There are many other band systems; see, e.g., here for a number of them.)  The strongest bands in that system start about 388 nm and involve transitions between states with the same vibrational quantum number (these are the "Δv = 0" bands); other bands happen near 350 nm (these are the "Δv = +1" bands, where the upper vibrational states have quantum numbers one larger than the lower state involved in the transition).  The "Δv = -1" bands, where the upper vibrational states have quantum numbers one less than the lower state, begin at 421.5 nm and degrade to smaller wavelengths.  In the figure linked above, these bands are blended into the short-wavelength side of the blend labeled "CH".

 

All this molecular spectrum stuff, BTW, is at the heart of the radiation physics of how the greenhouse effect works in the atmospheres of Earth and other planets.  CN is not important for planets (because there's essentially zero CN in planetary atmospheres), but it is quite important for red giant stars, because at temperatures 3500 to 5000 K, there is a non-negligible population of CN molecules in those stars' atmospheres, and all those spectral lines impede the flow the radiation out of the stellar atmosphere, which causes the very outermost layers to be cooler than they would be if there were no molecules, but the deeper layers are warmer.  The phenomenon is/was called "backwarming" when discussing stellar atmosphere physics.

 

So yes, 4215Å is 421.5 nm wavelength, and it is the long-wavelength edge (and strongest point, for the 0-1 band) for the Δv = -1 bands, and those are in the violet.  The other sequences are at wavelengths shorter than 400 nm, and so are not in the wavelength range designated as "visible".  (Those "what's visible" wavelength limits are squishy -- they vary by individual -- and I have never found a good discussion of how those were formulated and how much variation there is known to be.  I have had a number of students who reported being able to see the line of neutral helium at 388.9 nm, for example.)

[Pariah]

18 hours ago, Pariah said:

You know, I can never remember what color that dress was when all was said and done.

 

Found it!  

 

[Pariah]

Okay, first round of updates complete. Please let me know what I missed or otherwise FUBARed.

[Cancer]

Location: Gillikin Country, Oz

[Sociotard]

Location: Rural Idaho

 

Why? Well, Idaho isn't just potatoes. We also grow the most barley.

 

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Location: Malibu, CA 

 

 

[Hermit]

On 7/5/2020 at 2:44 PM, Pariah said:

 

 

Here's the twist: Your first pick must be a color. And all five protagonists must have some connection to that color. (The antagonist, location, and option picks are not constrained in this fashion.)

 

 

 

But we CAN constraint them if we want to eh? mmm

 

Location: Jodhpur, India (The Blue City)

And now? Let's dance..

 

 

 

[csyphrett]

I would like to pick Fawcett City

CES

[Bazza]

I’ll choose the Metropolis of Greenland: Nuuk (population 18,000, largest in Greenland)

[Psybolt]

Location:  Antarctica

 

[Dr. MID-Nite]

Well...it has to be done....Orange County California

[Cancer]

Another alternative was the one in France.

[Bazza]

I looked us “Green City” in Wikipedia and it redirected me to an article on sustainable development. 

[Cancer]

You could be our southern neighbor by picking The Emerald City, Oz.

[Old Man]

The Amazon is also known as the Emerald Forest. What’s left of it anyway. 

[Bazza]

12 hours ago, Bazza said:

I’ll choose the Metropolis of Greenland: Nuuk (population 18,000, largest in Greenland)

 

If it is okay with the Commissioner I would like to change this to Emerald City, Oz...otherwise known as Sydney.  

[Bazza]

Maybe I should draft all newbies as they are “green” ie lack experience.

[Psybolt]

Moon Knight

 

[Cancer]

Because later versions of her include a more variable color scheme (so I might lose her),

 

Triplicate Girl, Silver Age version