Conservators at the Brooklyn Museum are regular contributors to the museum’s blog. The most recent entry, by Pavlos Kapetanakis, project conservator of paper working on the Egyptian Book of the Dead of the Goldworker of Amun, Sobekmose, desribes how IR and UV light aid in examination and treatment.
Excerpt:
We typically use traditional photography to record images of artifacts in the visible light spectrum; this way we record on a digital file that which the human eye can see (fig.1). However, this technique can provide only a limited amount of information, since the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is a very small portion (400-700nm) of the entire spectrum. By eliminating the visible light using barrier filters, we are able to record images that the unaided human eye could not detect. Generally, we record images in the near infrared (700 to 900 nm) as well as the ultraviolet ranges (200- 400nm).
Link to the blog by clicking here.
