Spherical Harmonics - the movie

This is in a way a follow-up to the Easter Egg post. There I was showing the icosahedral based mesh with various flashing colors, with a background of transitions between spehrical harmonics (SH) to make an evolution. Taking away the visual effects and improving the resolution makes it, IMO, a good way of showing the whole family of spherical harmonics. I described those and how to calculate them here, with a visualisation as radial surfaces here.

Just reviewing - the SH are the analogue of trig functions in 1D Fourier analysis. They are orthogonal with respect to integration on the sirface, and as with 1D Fourier, you can project any function onto a subspace spanned by a finite set of them - that is, a least squares fit. The fit has various uses. I use one regularly in my presentation of TempLS results, and each month I show how it compares with the later GISS plot (well). I also use it as an integration method; all but the first SH's exactly integrate to zero, so with a projection onto SH space, the first coefficient gives the integral. I think it is nearly as good as the triangle mesh integration.

As with trig functions, the orthogonality occurs because they have oscillations that can't be brought into phase, but cancel. That is the main point of the pattern that I will show. There are two integer parameters, L and M, with 0≤M≤L. Broadly, L represents the total number of oscillations, some in latitude and some around the longitude, and M represents how they are divided. With M=0, the SH is a function of latitude only, and with M=L, of longitude only (in fact, a trig function sin(M*φ)). Otherwise there is an array of peaks and dips.

So in the following, the trackball globe shows a sequence of shaded plots, on a regular icosahedral mesh, of the first 100 SH. When M>1 the SH come in pairs, with the longitude variation either a sin or cos; I have shown only one case, since the other is just a rotation. The colors are normalised to the range of each; these mostly do not vary much. There are two sliders, but they both control the speed. Underneath, The L,M values are shown from the SH fading and the new one forming.