Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

need to test the brightness of the blue light emmission in a quantitative manner. Lux meter? mom says it's too expensive to buy. read something about using an image analysis software like Adobe Photoshop. do you know how this works and would it work for my experiment? is it expensive? any ideas?????

Hi

You sound like you are doing a very interesting project . Is it this one?

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p078.shtml

If so, one of the variations mentenioned at the end recommends using this project for making quantitative measurements of the light levels:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p054.shtml

Another approach, assuming you are able to take photographs of the comparative intensities of your luminal samples, might be to try to use the Applet at the bottom of this site to match the colors of your samples:

http://home.comcast.net/~ed-abramson/14 ... olors.html

The brightness parameter can then be used as an indication of the light emission intensity.

You may also be able to use this Science buddies project on analyze your digital photographs for the relative intensities of luminescence:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p014.shtml

You might also be able to adapt this project to do the job:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... yzer.shtml

Here is a paper relevant to the last technique above;

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... rticle.pdf

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... Report.pdf

If you try to adapt the TLC scanner technique you can ignore all the info down to the part where they discuss how to take and analyze pictures.

I hope this gives you some ideas on how to inexpensively analyze your data. This sounds like a very neat project. I hope you have fun with it!

Best regards,

Barrett L. Tomlinson