Spectra of lettuce

[Charlie Schweik]

Hi,
I've (I think) been successful in building a desktop spectrometry kit [1], capturing a spectra of a florescent bulb and uploading to the Spectral Workbench site, and calibrating it [2].
I've now tried to capture the spectra of a leaf of lettuce. But when I try and point to the leaf under a florescent bulb I pretty much get black (dark) spectra.
Could this be a problem with the CD the way light is reflecting in the spectrometer I built?
Thanks,
Charlie Schweik

[1] http://publiclab.org/wiki/dsk
[2] http://spectralworkbench.org/analyze/spectrum/43844

[Chris Fastie]

Charlie,

Your calibration spectrum is pretty dark.  You should be able to get a much brighter image of the diffraction pattern of a fluorescent lamp, especially if the lamp is right in front of the entrance slit. So unless there is something wrong with the camera, tweaking the setup should produce a brighter image. Then you should also be able to pick up light reflected from surfaces like lettuce.

Chris