Public Lab Research note


ABSOLUTE OPTICAL CALIBRATION USING A SIMPLE TUNGSTEN LIGHT BULB

by xiphmont | February 08, 2012 23:38 08 Feb 23:38 | #765 | #765

The attached paper shows how to use a tungsten-filament incandescent (a commonly available lamp that provides a particularly close physical approximation to an ideal black-body radiator) for absolute photometric calibration of a spectrophotometer.

The paper presents results of a physical experiment that achieved accuracy of 15% (and suggests the data was worse than it would otherwise have been due to stray light contamination).

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calibrate.pdf 110 KB 2012-02-08 23:38:57 +0000

2 Comments

@stoft @warren @gretchengehrke I was digging through some notes and saw this old post. thought you might be interested

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Mathew, thanks. It's an interesting technique, though not without some added work to characterize a diffusion surface and assure bulb stability. I also thought it interesting that they claimed the shorter wavelength point as an outlyer, they just assign light leakage at the total cause, did not remeasure and decided to just publish anyway. Hmmm. They also claimed 15% accuracy because their bulb sampling had that data spread. As a substitute standard, I'm not sure that is sufficient proof -- but still, it's an interesting method.

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