Blue sodalite from Greenland

Painterly fluorescence images

Greenland blue sodalite (collected by Mark Weller)

This image, taken with the rock under UVc (254nm Hg lamp) excitation, has a noticeably ‘painterly’ appearance although it was taken in good focus and was not processes with any of the Photoshop ‘artistic’ filters.

Looking at the fluorescing rock under a microscope shows why this happens. The UV photons enter the translucent crystals on the surface of the rock and excite fluorescence within their volume. As the fluorescent light emerges, it scatters and refracts in a way that largely obscures the surface topography, rather like looking at an object close behind a misted pane of glass.

This brilliantly coloured image shows this phenomenon particularly clearly.

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