Glowing Things: First UV Fluorescence Experiments

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:00:00 +0200

With the spectrometer alignment sorted and PySpectrometer3 taking shape, the obvious next experiment was UV fluorescence. Minerals, biological samples, gemstones — a lot of interesting chemistry shows up as emission spectra under UV excitation that you'd never see under white light. The setup is conceptually simple: illuminate the sample with UV, block the excitation from reaching the spectrometer, collect the fluorescence emission.

In practice the first problem appeared before I even built anything.

Fluorescence on ITOHI — Open-Source Hardware, Embedded Systems & DIY Builds

Glowing Things: First UV Fluorescence Experiments