RE:HYD: Spectrascope analysis of pigments

I've been doing some checking and there may be some potential here. Hand held spectrascopes are available on e-Bay for a reasonable price. these are based on difraction grating. With some you can get a bar graph reading  but  not a continuous curve,  but still usefull. You can take a direct reading of transmitted and perhaps also reflected light. This may be usefull in analysing colours of the flowers and of extracted pigments.

To use it as an infra-red tool you can use an infrared light source and take a digital picture. A lot of digital cameras will record infra-red light. To check if your camera does, turn it on and face it towards buisness end of a remote control, turn it on and off and observe the LCD screen. The infra-red light you can't see is picked up by the camera as a green light. Thus you can photogtraph the spectrum output. Of course you will need a pure sample or find a way of removing the profile of contaminants. I'm not sure how well  it will work with extracted pigments as there may be too many impurities to account for. But the pigments can be seperataed out by paper or thin-layer chromotography and these pure samples disolved in an appropriate solvent (lab quality) and the profile of the solvent accounted for or removed in some way and you have a usefull profile. Hopefully that is. 

Food for thought and a possible new tool.

Chuck Chapman

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