Ultraviolet

I wrote recently about the discovery that my Crystalens lenses in my eyes apprently let me see more visual light spectrum—specifically ultraviolet light—than most people's natural lenses.   There's an interesting web page I spent some time reading, written by someone who had discovered this additional spectral vision after Crystalens implants.   He had done research into what he could see that most other people couldn't.   I wanted to try out some of the tests on my own.  Today I had the first chance to do so.

Natural white light can be broken up into a spectrum of color using a prism.   Looking at a lovely rainbow of color is pretty, but the question was could I see further into the purple range than other people.  This is easy enough to do if you have a prism.  (I didn't have a prism.)

I'm sure my father has a panoply of prisms at his house but he was out of town and Amazon is just so blasted close (on my phone in my pocket) so I ordered a prism which arrived yesterday after dark.   That made today test day.  My husband and I did some preliminary tests and then ran out of time about the same point as the sun went behind a tree.

At dinner time tonight my husband was out doing some work with a customer.  I suddenly noticed the long rays of sun coming in from the dining room and quickly grabbed the prism.   The test I was trying to recreate was fairly easy: cast a rainbow on a wall or surface and mark with tape the leftmost (red) area I could see and the rightmost (purple) area I could see and then take a picture to see what the camera (and most other people) can see.

The camera and I saw about the same location of start/stop for the red-side of the spectrum.   The purple side was quite a bit different though.

I tried, tried, tried to get these pictures as accurate as I could but the sun was setting quickly and by the time I got the tape up and my camera out (a span of twenty to thirty seconds) there was a slight right-shift to the entire spectrum.   But it's fairly close.   The purple was just a lot more purple.   It was the longest color in the entire spectrum to me.   It was pretty neat to see such a difference.  Tomorrow, my husband and I hope to do some additional tests since he wasn't around today.

If you're interested in the web page I read, here's the link.   He has a lot of other sites referenced and he's done a far more thorough job of testing out the additional range of spectrum he can discern than I have with my little prism and tape test:  Ultraviolet Superpower with Crystalens.

The Big Boy Update:  My son sent his first text message today.  He told me that he loved his teacher Kica and it was so sweet and out of the blue that I sent Kica a text telling her what he said.   She responded back with a single heart emoji.   I showed it to my son because you don't have to read to know what a heart is.   Then it occurred to me: with the new emoji keyboard on my phone, he could send her a text message in pictures.   I asked him if he wanted to respond and he said yes.  He selected an American flag, a train, a plane, a tractor, several colored hearts, two people and a caution sign.   I'm not sure what the message was, be he was very pleased about sending it.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter likes to help with the dishes.   While I was putting up plates and cups and other things in the higher cabinets, she was sorting and putting up the utensils.   She put the big forks in the big fork area and the little forks in the little fork area and then she got completely and utterly distracted by the spoons.   There were big spoons and little spoons but wait, there was a third spoon and it was even bigger than the first two!  Ah, that's a serving spoon I told her and showed her where to put it.   But she wasn't done.   She wanted to know about that other drawer of utensils she didn't know about before (the second set we use for bigger gatherings).   I showed her those and then went back to putting up the dishes.   Not two minutes later she was ecstatically showing me the, "two biggest spoons!"   She had found the large serving spoon for the other set, taken it out and retrieved the serving spoon from the first set and proudly had them on the counter to show me.   We celebrated her discovery together.