☼ Blåck Lîght ☼

Please note that most of the opinions and views posted here by my friends and people I tolerate are NOT my views and opinions. Some or most of the pictures posted embarrass me. The person who maintains this page is an adult female (not nesessarily grown up) but married. No meetings are ever scheduled via Myspace-or anyspace for that matter.--------------- ------------------------------------------------------------ --- -------------- I'd like to save and use your bright, happy, fluorescent, glowing, funky, crazy, fun pictures. Don't stop sending them! ------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- I emit electromagnetic radiation that is almost exclusively in the soft near ultraviolet range, and very little visible light. ----------------------------------------------------------- I'm typically made in the same fashion as normal fluorescent lights except that only one phosphor is used and the normally clear glass envelope of me may be replaced by a deep-bluish-purple glass called Wood's glass, a nickel-oxide–, cobalt-oxide–doped glass, which blocks almost all visible light above 400 nanometers. My color is often referred to in the trade as blacklite blue. ----------------------------------------------------------- Switch me on and various things glow while I only emit a faint purple light. ----------------------------------------------------------- I'm all around - in clubs, science museums, amusement parks and teenagers' bedrooms, among other places such as adults' bedrooms.....- To a lot of people, I'm a total mystery. ----------------------------------------------------------- Black light testing is commonly used to authenticate antiques and bank notes. It is extensively used in non-destructive testing; fluorescing fluids are applied to metal structures and illuminated with me. Cracks and other artifacts can easily be detected. ----------------------------------------------------------- I'm also used to illuminate pictures painted with fluorescent colors (preferably on black velvet to intensify the illusion of self-illumination). The fluorescence it prompts from certain textile fibers, especially those bearing optical brightener residue, is also used as a recreational effect (as seen for instance in the opening credits of the James Bond film A View to a Kill). ----------------------------------------------------------- In forensic investigations, I'm used to reveal the presence of trace evidence, such as blood, urine, semen and saliva, by causing visible fluorescence in these substances. The use of this technique by exposé style television news magazines for reporting on the various unsanitary and mysterious stains found in hotel rooms has become such an oft-repeated stunt that it has been lampooned on comedy shows such as Family Guy. ----------------------------------------------------------- When energized, mercury atoms emit energy in the form of light photons. They emit some visible light photons, but mostly they emit photons in the ultraviolet (UV) wavelength range. UV light waves are too short for you to see - they are completely invisible - so I have to convert this energy into visible light. I do this with a phosphor coating around the outside of the tube. ----------------------------------------------------------- Phosphors are substances that give off light, or fluoresce, when they are exposed to light. When a photon hits a phosphor atom, one of the phosphor's electrons jumps to a higher energy level, causing the atom to vibrate and create heat. When the electron falls back to its normal level, it releases energy in the form of another photon. This photon has less energy than the original photon, because some energy was lost as heat. In a fluorescent lamp, the emitted light is in the visible spectrum - the phosphor gives off white light you can see. ----------------------------------------------------------- I work on this same principle. There are actually two different types of black light, but they work in basically the same way. ----------------------------------------------------------- The tube black light is a basically a fluorescent lamp with a different sort of phosphor coating. This coating absorbs harmful shortwave UV-B and UV-C light and emits UV-A light (in the same basic way the phosphor in a fluorescent lamp absorbs UV light and emits visible light). The "black" glass tube itself blocks most visible light, so in the end only benign long-wave UV-A light and some blue and violet visible light pass through. ----------------------------------------------------------- The incandescent black light bulb (me) is similar to a normal household light bulb, but it uses light filters to absorb the light from the heated filament. It absorbs everything except the infrared and UV-A light (and a little bit of visible light). ----------------------------------------------------------- In both light designs, the emitted UV light reacts with various external phosphors in exactly the same way as the UV light inside a fluorescent lamp reacts with the phosphor coating. The external phosphors glow as long as the UV light is shining on them.-------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- -------------------------------------------