A Glowing Display!

A while ago, I took my kids to a Mineral Show. We can't really claim to be serious mineral collectors or anything, but we like cool rocks and fossils, and it sounded like fun. It was, and I even found a couple of things that I couldn't resist buying. One was a fantastic fossilized fish (how's that for alliteration - my English teachers would be so proud!). The only fossils I ever found were ferns and other plants. Cool, but not as cool as a fish! It's not very big, about 4" wide x 2.5" high.

I also got a fluorescent rock that glowed red & green under UV light. It looked like granite. I was very disappointed when I got home and put it under a black light, though. It didn't glow anything like it did at the show. Drat!

I found  a nice little shadow box display frame, as you'll see in a moment. It has one big section that would accommodate the fossil just fine, and three smaller sections below. I wasn't sure what I'd put in those. Unfortunately, that decision was slow in coming. Time passed, and the fossil and display frame got buried under the stratified layers of stuff surrounding my desk in the man cave, out of sight and out of mind for maybe a year.

As luck would have it, I ended up buying a new computer, which necessitated buying a new desk, which necessitated a cleanup - nay, excavation - of my cave. There, under the accumulated detritus of human activity, did I find my treasure. And, I knew exactly what I wanted to put in those pesky little sections on the bottom!

When I was a kid, one of the favorite displays in Boston's Museum of Science was a glass case containing a bunch of fluorescent mineral samples. On a timer, the display case lighting would alternate between white light and a black light (or so I thought), and some of the specimens were absolutely dazzling. Here's a photo of such a display, though this isn't the one from the Museum of Science.

I decided to try to find some rocks that fluoresce under black light. Well, it took some digging, but Google didn't let me down. I eventually made my way to geology.com and learned a few things. First of all, I found out that what we call "black light" is longwave ultraviolet, UV-A, with a wavelength in the neighborhood of 365nm. There are minerals that fluoresce at that wavelength, but there are more that fluoresce under shortwave ultraviolet, UV-C, with a wavelength in the neighborhood of 254nm.

You can't get shortwave UV lamps in the party store, but you can at geology.com. I actually got one with a switch to select between shortwave and longwave UV. And equally good, their online store carries a Fluorescent Mineral Collection for a reasonable price! Apparently, I'm not the only one that likes this stuff!

I was like a kid on Christmas morning the day the package arrived. I opened up the mineral collection, put the batteries in the lamp, put on the safety glasses of course (UV-A is bad for your eyes & skin), and had a look at the rocks I bought. I tried the longwave UV first, and was disappointed because only a couple samples fluoresced. I expected that, but plain old blacklight would make displaying my treasures easier, since I could buy UV LEDs or a black light bulb or something.

Under short-wave ultraviolet light, though, two of the specimens fluoresced beautifully. And they were a perfect fit for the display frame, so I mounted them immediately. Those are the two in the middle & left spaces. The third one, on the right, fluoresces a little bit, a deep red, but is disappointing compared to the others. That one didn't come from the mineral collection I bought, though. It came from a bag of tumbled rocks I bought for my son at the Polar Caves on vacation a while back.

The specimen on the left is Opalite, from New Mexico, and  glows a nice green. The little bit of glowing blue that you see is actually a number label that I couldn't manage to remove. The middle is Willemite-Calcite from New Jersey, and glows red and green. I'm not sure which is which, but it looks great. I've no idea what the specimen on the right is.

Oh, and that other rock I bought at the mineral show, the one that didn't glow under ordinary black light? It fluoresces a brilliant red & green under shortwave UV, so I suspect it's another sample of Willemite-Calcite.

Having finished securing everything in the display frame, I now needed a way to mount it. I figured it would look nice hanging on a wall, and didn't really want to use a boring picture hanger. I'm a huge fan of Steampunk, so I started casting about for a way to Steampunk-ify my handiwork. I did it by making a leather hanging strap for the frame, attached to it by brass buckles.

I bought a strip of black leather from a craft shop, and cut it to size. The buckles actually came from the scrapbooking section of the same store. Apparently, folks use them as embellishments on their pages. I've no idea how they'd to that (my wife would - she's an amazing scrapbooker), but I like the way it came out.

Here's the finished product, hanging on my wall. Don't mind the cords and things; my workspace is definitely a work in progress!