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Well, it's softer than quartz. I no longer have all my mineral text books and it has been far too long since I even gave this field much thought. Sorry. I wish I could be of more help.
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ArcticMyst Security by Avery
(A) Mineral phosphorescence
- Thread starter steve001
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Looks to me like Scapolite, although, hard to tell from just a photograph.
It could also be a form of massive fluorite with Calcite. Again, I am shooting from the hip here.
What color does it fluoresce? Red/pink?
Those short wave bulbs require a UV bandpass filter, not woods glass to prevent the most of the blue and green light from the Hg discharge to obscure the fluorescence.
Color is mentioned on the first post. Interestingly it also photoluminesces the same color under 523 nm light.
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I have seen something like this with baryt. See attachment.
That is precisely the color my rock luminesces. Maybe Baryte is what I've got because it's found where I live.
I had already suspected because of the look of your sample-picture and hang here therefore again a picture of my pattern in bright.
Baryte has a relatively high density of 4.5 g / cm3 and is therefore easy to verify.
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Interesting. Since the density is relatively high, it might not be too difficult to determine if this is indeed baryte. Also, a loop of a small sample in a flame may help reveal its chemical composition. I was thrown by the spelling. I used to call this barite. It is the main source of barium in ore.
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I do not want to jostle now, but .... did you measure the density?
Not yet.
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Barite, being a major barium ore is quite dense. Back when I was into mineralogy we use spec. gravity as a measure of density. It is easily done as you let the ore displace an amount of water equal to its volume.
I've been doing this for years, It's a handy tool to have when looking for fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals as well. Calcite is especially responsive and has a reddish/orange glow for almost a full second after the beam passes! I'm guessing this is due in part to the drastic change in energy/wavelength of the light to the opposite end of the visible spectrum?
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Many calcite examples are not fluorescent. I have a large piece of Icelandic calcite that is birefringent, but does not fluoresce at all. I have noticed this among calcite crystals especially.
I also have a piece of Icelandic calcite and indeed it does not fluoresce, the birefringence is really interesting though! I always show my students when I teach my optics class, you can actually get a similar effect by laminating multiple pieces of glass with different refractive indices
I also have other samples of calcite that don't fluoresce and some that are green/yellowish, but the orange/red ones are the only ones that seem to trail behind the beam for a second.
Thats really interesting, any idea what is in the cement that is causing he fluorescence? I'll have to try that in my house, I definitely haven't noticed it before!
No I don't. I have a flourite crystal that luminesces orange. Some other minerals such as calcite belonging to someone I know luminesce light blue or an orangish pink. Some common things around the house I may have mentioned earlier are white paint and plaster. All of them give off a pale white after glow. To date I've not found any naturally occuring minerals while hiking that
*luminesce or fluoresce. Like to find some that do.
*Except the one that started this thread.
