Hi Andy,
Thanks for the comments. Using a A0 star was exactly what I did to start with. By removing the hydrogen lines this left a nice continuum. But what I found was that at the blue end it produced some odd results because of the shape of the continuum in this regime. In the basic library with Visual Spec the spectrum of Vega, for example has a sharp cut off then some oscillating components. Smoothing this out leads to dips in the continuum which I believe is not reflective of whats going on with a meteor. I could be plain wrong about this of course but I’ve made the assumption that even though a meteor may not have a genuine continuum the spectrum would be superimposed on a hypothetical blackbody continuum of the meteor temperture.
So it might very well be a two step process in the end. Divide through by the si response then do another division with the appropriate black body curve. The plan is to sort out this years Perseid results then go back and try some comparisons with normalised spectra from the ones I’ve collected using both the stellar method and si curve to see how they look.
However this issue isn’t of importance for basic line ID and wavelength calibrations but it’s a necessary step to get a good handle on it for proper flux calibration and measurement. The scientific papers I seen on this seem to me to be VERY complex and need complicated modelling of various parameters. So it’s possible to do but it might take someone with more computing and maths skills than me to crack!
Mmmm, tricky, very tricky but a fascinating challenge! 😉
cheers,
Bill.