Chemistry Library: Using CIE lib and spectral data together

I've been working on a coding project in my spare time to do various computational things with Chemistry. One of the requirements being that I have a rather complete data set to work with, which includes-- among other things-- The complete spectra of every element possible in the periodic table in all of the various ionization states. This is a result of using CIE Lib to display the spectral power distribution of the line spectrum of the element Neon:

Click on the image for a larger size

Each spectrum is displayed in ascending ionization levels from top to bottom with the topmost line depicting the standard observer, so the neutral Neon atom is at the top, then singly ionized and so-forth. I've seen lots of graphical representations of spectra on the web, and I think I know why Neon seems so weird: They all show the singly-ionized atom, rather  than the neutral atom.

One item to note: In the full-size image, you may notice that the spectral lines are a bit thick, this is because the rendering method used in this application is to sweep the extremes of the visual spectrum and getting a value within a certain tolerance, the other way to render would be to just draw the spectral lines in order, which would give a much more crisp and accurate result. Maybe I'll do that on the next post!

CIE Library: Illuminants

And, here's an image of what the illuminants look like using the 1964 observer:

Just a couple quick notes about this image: The spectra are rendered using a gamma of 1.8, which seems to work best, aesthetically, however, I do think they're meant to be rendered with a linear gamma. The first is the standard observer, second is CIE Illuminant A, and the third is D65, after that are the fluorescent illuminants, F1-F12 the first 6 are standard fluorescent illumination the next 3 are high CRI illuminants, and the final 3 are described as three band illuminants.

You'll note in all of the fluorescent samples that the light has strong peaks in the green and blue ranges, and with the exception of the 3-band examples, they all have a relatively weak yellow peak.

The high-cri examples do a little better than the standard fluorescent ones, but not much. I imagine you'd get less metameric failure with that lighting. This also explains the green cast in camera images recorded under fluorescent lighting conditions. It appears F3 and F4 maybe "warm white" while the rest are cool white.

CIE library: The Observers

First, this is not official CIE anything (except the data for standard observer, white points, and illumination sources)

As a test, I wrote a quick program to draw the standard observers from 250nm to 750nm on a window and compare the two, the top observer is the 1964 10° data, the bottom observer is the 1931 2° data. This is approximately how you perceive the spectrum. The colors have been converted from the CIEXYZ color space to the sRGB color space, and have been mapped using a source gamma of 1.8, which is likely incorrect, but gives a nice display for me.

This was a quickie, and I'm sure I could get a better rendering, but that wasn't the focus of this exercise. and yes, I realize that 250-750 is way overkill for these, but this gets into all of the UV and Near IR ranges common in such sources as sunlight.