Starlight has a barcode.

The Rydberg formula above predicts the exact wavelengths of the hydrogen atom's Balmer series (transitions that land on n=2), using R = 1.097 × 10⁷ m⁻¹. As n climbs toward infinity the lines crowd together and converge on the series limit at 364.6 nm — the slider stops at n=9 (383.7 nm) because lines much past that sit right at the edge of what the eye can see. The hero panel on the right shows an emission line: a single bright color against black, the way a gas-discharge tube (like a neon sign) actually looks. Real starlight instead shows absorption: a continuous rainbow with narrow dark gaps where each element on the way out removed its own wavelengths — that's what the bar below the star picker shows, and hydrogen's own dark gaps sit at these same four Balmer wavelengths. The relative darkness of each element's lines per star is an honest but qualitative illustration of a well-established real pattern in stellar spectral classification (the Morgan–Keenan OBAFGKM sequence), not a precise measured equivalent width. Effective temperatures used: Rigel ~12,100 K, Sirius A ~9,940 K, the Sun 5,778 K, Betelgeuse ~3,600 K. Titanium oxide's absorption is shown at its two strongest real band heads (615.9 nm and 705.8 nm) rather than as a sharp line, since a molecule's absorption spans a band of wavelengths, not one exact point the way a single atom's does.