I took the picture below by sending red laser light through a single slit of width 0.08 mm in a darkened room. The light travelled a distance of 6.05 meters to a projection screen. I took a photograph of the screen from a distance of 4.05 meters with a Nikon D50 camera, using a 55mm lens at f/5.6 in raw format. Each pixel is about 7.88 microns on a side. I exposed for three seconds and applied the automatic dark correction.
The format is two columns: first pixel number, then intensity, like this:
900 5097.00 901 5194.00 902 5064.00 903 6013.00
Note that the central region, roughly between pixels 1400 and 1550, is saturated, so the recorded intensity is far smaller than the actual intensity.
Copyright © Michael Richmond. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.