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I’m an amateur astronomer tasked with giving an educational talk to fellow amateur astronomers about how to clean optical surfaces like the lenses of eyepieces and telescopes. I wanted to run a small experiment cleaning some uniform glass samples (that had been coated with dust and mineral deposits) with a variety of commercial and homemade cleaning solutions. But how to quantify the efficacy of the cleaning process? I decided I could run the glass samples before and after the cleaning process through a spectrophotometer and compare transmission profiles. And one can buy a used student spectrophotometer these days on eBay for a ridiculously low price …. but we all have way too much stuff that we buy, use once and then stash away.”

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