Microscopy, mineralogy, photography and spectroscopy should be the
keywords of this web page. You'll find therein my own collection of
thin section slides manufactured from rocks collected in the field during walks.
My purpose was not to make a systematic presentation of rocks under the
microscope but simply to show some interesting images of minerals and
rocks. Minerals spectroscopy has also been introduced with technical details of
the construction of the spectrometers.
The majority of the thin sections and
polished slabs included here have been manufactured manually with glass plates
and abrasive powders according to the suggestions of Mac Kenzie and Guilford in
their atlas of petrography. I'm also adding images of sections I have
bought.
The sections of this site have now been renewed using Benford Plate for the Crossed Polars views (except otherwise indicated). This
method allows to create Wide Field Images
with a rendering much closer to what can be seen live through the microscope.
This technique gives a better impression of the overall structure of the
rocks without sacrificing the details. As an example, see this picture of an
H3 Meteorite
exhibiting a wide collection of different kind of chondrules. Due to the higher
resolution, the size of the image files are higher, generally between 1.5 and
3MB.
Raman
Microscope for the amateur mineralogist.
The purpose of these pages is to
show that with the optical components and detectors presently on the market,
Raman Spectroscopy is no more a technique restricted to the professionals but
amateur mineralogists and clubs can now think about the implementation of such an
instrument for their own identification of minerals in rock sections and
meteorites.
A
spectrograph (2013) has been build to improve Raman spectroscopy
.
A second laser (2014) has been added to the system
to improve the detection of some highly fluorescent minerals.
A NIR laser at 780 nm
(2017) has been added. This laser can be used in case of strong fluorescence at
the other wavelength.
In addition of thin sections of rocks and meteorites, I
have also included some convergent
light pictures, an illustration of the measurement of the indices
of refraction of small crystals with different techniques (in particular the
phase contrast microscopy), a collection of stereoscopic
photographs of minerals (anaglyphs) which can be viewed with color
filter glasses and the design of some microscope spectrometers which can
be used to study the transmission and reflection spectra of small crystals of the thin sections
in the visible and NIR wavelength ranges..
A chart is proposed to
test the crosstalk of
3D monitors. (2015).
Addition of
home made devices for
stereoscopy and
mirror and prism stereoscopes (2016).
Addition of a fiber optics
spectrometer for microscope, use of an Alpy 600 spectrograph on a microscope and
tests of an echelle grating spectrograph (2020).
Addition of Fluorescence imaging
and spectroscopy (2020).
Addition of
Minerals Radioactivity measurement
(2021).
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