Making glow-in-the-dark Strontium Aluminate
37 comments
·January 19, 2025jawns
ceejayoz
I have a tritium keychain that makes it delightfully easy to find my dropped keys in the dark garage.
And some GMO petunias that glow 24/7. https://www.instagram.com/p/C8_Dgqvuq2C/
xattt
Tritium-lit pacifiers sure sound like a legitimate 1950s atomic age product.
pfdietz
There's a youtube channel from someone who finds and reports frivolous radioactive products to the NRC, getting them banned. It happens even today.
mrgaro
Not sure what the modern one are, but they will still glow in the morning hours. They are very very handy!
swayvil
Looking for seed. Only seeing little plants (which ship terribly and cost way too much). Petunias are dead easy to grow from seed.
pentamassiv
Not the Firefly petunia. They were engineered to not grow from a seed so they don't accidentally spread
gus_massa
We had a pacifier chain shapped like an elphant head that included a hidden rattle. It's very useful to find it when it's indide the sheets or cloths.
lightedman
Hey, I mine the stuff needed to make this stuff, but it sits as display pieces in my fluorescent cases.
34.7576, -116.2790
Lots of agate in the area, too.
latchkey
Woah, two weeks ago, I just randomly boondocked a few miles directly south from there.
lightedman
So Pisgah or Lavic or Amboy. All great places to escape.
latchkey
Little bit further... 34°09'54.6"N 116°12'57.0"W
Was heading through JTree...
f1shy
A video about it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SIWcvudEPVA&pp=ygUTc3Ryb250aXV...
code_duck
Pretty interesting. I knew someone years ago who made batches of borosilicate glass with this stuff. It’s difficult to work, unfortunately. The glow effect fades if you work it too much. I still have a bunch of his glow glass.
the8472
Would Strontium-90 make it glow ~permanently?
GravitasFailure
Huh, it very well might. 90Sr is a beta emitter, which should excite phosphorescent materials nicely. Even better, it decays into Yttrium 90, and Yttrium Aluminate is also phosphorescent (it's also the YA in YAG lasers). Anyone have some spare 90Sr we can test this with?
0culus
Well, with a 28.8 years half life it should glow a while. BUT, the largest license exempt quantity one can get iirc is 0.1 uCi. Plus it’s a fission product so good luck making it yourself. :) I don’t recommend the radioactive Boy Scout approach.
ianmcgowan
Also allow the baby to read minds and see through walls - that triggered a burst of nostalgia for the comic Strontium Dog:
swayvil
Hey I bought this stuff on amaz. It's good. Made glow plastic (mix with epoxy), glow goo (mix with water gel)
dekhn
Yeah, I've used this- I CNC shapes into plastic, then backfill with glow-epoxy. It works incredibly well with a UV lamp.
crazydoggers
This is what is typically used in nice mechanical watch dials nowadays.
Aardwolf
The combination of green glow and strontium somehow sounds very radioactive, even though I assume it's not a radioactive isotope they're using here
When my kids were little, we had glow in the dark pacifiers that lasted ALL NIGHT. I still don't know what sorcery was used to accomplish that, but if any of you have little ones, the MAM brand is what we used. Being able to spot the pacifier in the crib at 5am was a huge help some nights.
And now my kids each have an extra eyeball, which has proven very useful indeed.