Recently, I've been interested in expanding an angular function over the spherical harmonics, and particularly in retrieving the amplitude of the part corresponding to a given degree \(\ell\). More precisely, let \(F(\Omega) = F(\theta,\phi) =\sum_{\ell} \sum_{m} Y_{\ell m} (\Omega)\). The projection of \(F\) onto the subspace spanned by the harmonics with a given degree \(\ell\) (I believe this space is generally denoted by \(\mathcal{H}_{\ell}\)) is:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:proj1}
\operatorname{Proj}_{\ell} \left [F \right ] (\Omega) = \sum_{m= - \ell}^{\ell} c_{\ell m} Y_{\ell m} (\Omega)
\end{equation}