[Rockhounds] Add to / Fluorescence indoors and out

[erich kern]

Since much of the lint dust in the house is from fabric with an optical brightner, it's easily found with a LW U/V lamp.

Walk up your stairs in the dark with your U/V lamp. You'll be surprised at the glow emanating from the nooks and crannies on the stairs, especially where the stair meets the wall and at the rear of each stair riser. 

Erich Kern
Murrieta, CA


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Earl R. Verbeek 
To: 'Rockhounds at drizzle.com: A mailing list for rock and gem collectors' 
Sent: Friday, May 01, 2009 6:52 AM
Subject: RE: [Rockhounds] Fluorescence indoors and out


Gene Hartstein - Fossilnut.com wrote:
> Clothing and laundry detergents  fluoresce a bright white. Take a lamp 
> into your laundry room with the lights out. 

Don Halterman wrote:
And the kitchen and bathroom...

"Eeeeeeuw!!!"  -- Lisa, former girlfriend

"Oh holy ***!  What the ****!  You said you cleaned the bathroom 
cabron!"  -- Juan, my former neighbor, to his roommate Miguel
------------------------------

OK, here's a little more on the subject.  It's incomplete, so if any of you
have other examples/details to offer, please send them in.  It gets to rocks
eventually (scroll down).  We have fun with this sort of thing at Sterling
Hill...

        Cheers-    Earl

Using Your Ultraviolet Lamp:  Some Suggested Activities


Indoor Activities

A nighttime trip through your home with an ultraviolet lamp is guaranteed to
be an interesting experience.  Here are a few suggestions for things you can
try:

In the kitchen:
Many foods and drinks fluoresce.  Milk, beer, and tonic water
fluoresce, as do many soft drinks, but pure water does not.  Some vegetables
and fruits fluoresce.  Green peppers are interesting:  they fluoresce red,
but only when freshly cut.  When dinner is served tonight, try turning out
the lights and beaming an ultraviolet light on your food.  Do you still want
to eat it?
Many glass, ceramic, and plastic items used in the kitchen
fluoresce, but metallic items (silverware) do not.  If you have leaded glass
wine goblets, for example, examine them under a shortwave ultraviolet
lamp-they fluoresce brilliant blue.  Ordinary glass will fluoresce weak
yellowish green or not at all.  Your dinner plates may well fluoresce,
especially where they are chipped to expose the unglazed porcelain beneath.
For a particularly disturbing experience, beam your ultraviolet lamp
on the wall above your stove.  Notice all those disgusting stains?  If you
are like most people, your kitchen is considerably less clean than you think
it is.  Daylight reveals little, but ultraviolet light may reveal far more
than you'd like.

In the bathroom:
As in the kitchen, you should find many items that fluoresce in your
bathroom.  Among the likely possibilities:  your toothbrush, shampoo bottles
(and the shampoo within), soap, and aspirin.
For those who definitely are not faint of heart, try beaming your
ultraviolet light in the bathtub, around the toilet, and around the bathroom
sink.  We leave the details to you . . .

In the living room:
Try examining the fabric on your chairs and couch and the fibers of
your living-room rug under ultraviolet light.  You may find, for example,
that some of the fibers in your rug glow brightly, perhaps in more than one
color, whereas others do not glow at all.  Specialists in criminal forensics
routinely inspect crime scenes with ultraviolet light, in part to look for
just such fluorescent fibers, which sometimes can link a transported victim
to the very room where the crime took place.

In the bedroom:
Most or all of your white undergarments should glow brilliant
blue-white under longwave ultraviolet light.  This is no accident, for
nearly all laundry detergents sold in the U.S. contain an optical brightener
that is designed to fluoresce in sunlight.  The bright blue-white
fluorescence offsets the yellowish tone of incompletely cleaned or old cloth
and makes your clothes appear whiter-and hence cleaner-than they really are.
Similarly, most typing and copy paper is treated with an optical brightener
to increase its apparent whiteness.
Other clothes in your closet probably will fluoresce also.  Pay
particular attention to those that fluoresce in a color different from their
color in daylight.  You may find a blue sweater that fluoresces red, or a
green sweatshirt that fluoresces blue.

In the basement:
If you live in a humid climate and have stored galvanized nails,
screws, or fencing for years, you may find that these items fluoresce blue
under shortwave ultraviolet light.  The fluorescence arises from
hydrozincite, an alteration product of the zinc coating that prevents these
items from rusting.

In the garage:
[automotive fluids.develop this later..]

Outdoor Activities

What you find in the way of fluorescence outdoors depends largely on where
you live.  Here are a few likely possibilities:

Wood:  The wood of many trees and shrubs fluoresces, though usually not
brightly.  Among the brightest of the fluorescing woods are sumac, black
locust, and mesquite [check the latter!!  Can't remember].  Also check
leaves; these fluoresce when dry (autumn, winter)

Lichens:  Lichens are the low-growing, scaly plants that grow in small,
circular to lobate patches on rocks.  Many species of lichen fluoresce, some
of them quite brightly.

Fungi:  Some mushrooms fluoresce, as do many molds.  The fluorescence of
molds can be a most useful property:  food inspectors, for example,
routinely use ultraviolet lamps to detect the aflatoxin mold, which is
deadly to humans and commonly infests peanuts.

Shells:  The calcium carbonate in sea shells and in coral fluoresces, most
often in hues of white, yellow, cream, pale orange, or pale blue, and rarely
red.  Shells pulverized into sand by the sea are a common component of beach
sand worldwide.  Some sands, such as those along many tropical beaches, are
composed mostly of shells and coral and are strongly fluorescent.  Other
sands, such as those along much of the eastern seaboard of the United
States, are composed mostly of nonfluorescent quartz, but even in these the
tiny grains of shells can instantly be detected at night with a longwave
ultraviolet lamp.

Minerals:
The ultimate in outdoor recreation with an ultraviolet lamp is prospecting
for valuable mineral deposits.  Many deposits were found in this way,
particularly deposits of scheelite during the tungsten boom of the 1930s and
1940s, and of uranium during the uranium boom of the 1960s and 1970s.  Even
if you don't find a mineral deposit, continued searching of rocky areas with
an ultraviolet lamp will almost certainly yield interesting specimens that
you may wish to take home.
Opportunities abound even in areas where little or no rock is exposed.
Exciting discoveries may await you in the crushed rock used for gravel
driveways and landscape decoration, in the rock facing of downtown
buildings, in the rip-rap along drainage culverts and dams, and even in the
aggregate used in concrete.  You can also examine sand along stream valleys
and beaches near the seashore, where you are likely to find tiny,
yellow-fluorescing grains of zircon, a zirconium silicate mineral widespread
in many igneous and metamorphic rocks, and in the sediments derived from
them.

Plants:
[chlorophyll; discuss later.  Dried leaves in autumn or winter, ditto]

Animals:
Scorpions, glowworms, people, cats (Hi Gary!), etc. [Warn again about SW UV;
DO NOT point at animals.  Use LW only]

Antlers, bones:
[Deer bones and antlers in eastern U.S. often fluoresce pink to pale blue.
Don't know why...]






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