Rock On! Real Estate presents: Ultra-Violet (UV) Minerals

[@Muonium1]

I was going to comment on your other video to grab a UV light to have a look at your amazing collection of synthetics, *BUT IT LOOKS LIKE YOU ALREADY FOUND THEM* !! 🤣 Your Terlingua piece is exceptional. That looks like a real Terlingua chunk from the actual Little 38 mine to me, and probably worth quite a chunk of change if so. It should show WAY more spectacular phosphorescence under 254nm short compared to the 365nm long though, but maybe that just wasn't shown on camera. If I may give a couple pieces of advice - it looks like your small longwave LED light doesn't have any filter on it, and you may want to get a ZWB2 filter to reduce the amount of visible light fluorescence coming from the emitter chip itself to "clean" the output of the light. They're very cheap and everything looks much more dramatic under true, pure, filtered UV light. Also, please be extremely, EXTREMELY careful with the laser source. I work in the world of ultrahigh power lasers for nuclear fusion research and people just don't really know how dangerous these cheap "UV" 405nm lasers really are. Because of regulations in other countries prohibiting the sale of laser pointers more powerful than 5mW, the Chinese have simply falsely labeled everything they sell as being less than that amount to get around the restriction, while in fact they are emitting often TEN or TWENTY TIMES that much power. I have the exact same model you show here and tested it on a laser power meter at work which showed it was emitting over 70 mW of light. Because this wavelength is so efficiently absorbed by the red colored retina, these power levels will destroy vision instantly even if only a specular reflection off a shiny but non-mirrored surface enters the eye. I would never use it around kids or shining on faceted crystals in close proximity to others without everyone having some kind of eye protection on. This brings me to my last point, eye protection. The cheap polycarbonate goggles used to block UV are not all created equal, I have recently found. The ones you show here are great for blocking long and shortwave 365nm and 254nm respectively, but do essentially nothing to block anything around 390nm or longer and will not block any of the 405nm laser light. However, in addition to the yellow tinted lenses which you mention, I have recently found two sources for UV blocking eyewear that DO appear to block these wavelengths too, and do it without tinting the overall color of visible light passing through them. They look perfectly clear like normal polycarbonate lenses. They are the "Blokz" blue-blocking glasses from Zenni optical, and the UVP goggles type 98-0002-01 from UVP (now called AnalyticJena). These must have some kind of additional additive in them and I find they block the violet light of the 405nm lasers EXCEPTIONALLY well. I would still never ever look directly into the beam, but there is no question they make using the laser FAR safer than without them, and further still, they allow you to observe the fluorescence excited by this wavelength in near total isolation from the otherwise blinding violet light the item you are investigating would otherwise be flooded with when not wearing them. Cool to find another UV fan out there and happy mineral hunting!!

[@RickMarittaDalrymple]

Thank you very much for the comment and suggestions! Much of what you say I did know but some of this is new to me. Glad to have better eye protection options, I will check those out. It's nice to meet a fellow aficionado... yes I got the Terlingua piece (correct, Little 38) decades ago. It's one of my favorites. If you are ever in Salt Lake City come on by for a visit.

[@Muonium1]

@@RickMarittaDalrymple No prob, and will do! Same to you if you're ever in Rochester NY (for some godforsaken reason, lol) and want a look around the world's second most powerful laser fusion facility. One last thing regarding the video - your antique glass pieces - I don't think they're actually uranium glass. Because of the lack of green tint under ambient white light and due to the sort of yellowish cast in the fluorescence light they emit, I think these are manganese glass pieces you have there (same fluorescence activator as in your Franklin / Ogdensberg willemite and calicite piece). Manganese started being added to glass in the 19th century as "glassmaker's soap" to "wash" the green coloration out of common soda lime glass imparted by trace iron impurities. To determine this for certain, take the cut glass candy dish into a totally dark room and close your eyes (to preserve dark adapted vision) while illuminating it with your brightest longwave LED, then open your eyes the instant you switch the light off and you will observe a very short, maybe two tenths of a second long, orange-red phosphorescence; this is from the very same mechanism as the brief phosphorescent red flash in the Franklin calcite. Uranium doped glass shows no visually observable phosphorescent flash.

[@RickMarittaDalrymple]

@@Muonium1 sounds like we now have a reason to visit Rochester 😄🙏 I had wondered if the glass was magnesium, I will test it.