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What's the easiest and most affordable way for obtaining UV reflectance images?

Started Apr 24, 2021 | Questions thread
petrochemist Veteran Member • Posts: 3,619
Re: Multispectral band extraction

Ed Constable wrote:

I was surprised when I checked the UV transmission of a normal microscope cover glass that I had surlyned over an OLED material. It was a very effective UV filter (cutoff about 290 if I remember). You don't even want to imagine what thin quartz sheets cost. In the end I pirated a CaF2 window from an old spectrometer and cut it into sheets.

290nm isn't that bad, few if any of my lenses transmit anything near so low. I only recorded transmission down to 300nm and only two that I've checked give more than 0.05% transmission. Photographing down to 300nm would be quite enough for me.

I think my boss would be upset if I sliced up our only CaF2 cell. The only DIY conversion I've tried has been on a very cheap Kodak compact where I didn't replace the hotmirror with anything. Not surprisingly focus afterwards was way off. Quartz sheets would clearly be many times the cost of the camera here (£3 IIRC).

I could easily get hold of quartz cuvettes but they'd only be 10mm wide & 1mm thick (not wide enough for many & far too thick) I can buy 1mm thick quartz windows for under £20 but sadly thinner than that isn't a stock item.

I could possibly get away with cleaving & polishing some old NaCl windows, which should get down to 250nm, but I think atmospheric moisture would fog them quickly & they'd corrode the camera internals.

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