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Old 02-11-2009, 09:50 AM
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pmrid (Peter)
Ageing badly.

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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Cloudy, light-polluted Bribie Is.
Posts: 3,665
Isopropyl Alcohol as a lens/mirror cleaner or dissolver of optical coatings

What are your thoughts about this. I was about to embark upon a morning chore of removing the dust motes and other bits of whatever that seems to end up on glass surfaces and imaging chips. I'd seen somewhere in these forums a reference to isoptopyl alcohol as the cleaner of choice for this sort of job. The only form of this stuff my chemist could supply was a 65% solution (it didn't say what the other 35% was) under the brand name isocol. I wasn't entirely comfiortable - not knowing what that other 35% was and being concerned about the effect of this stuff on coated optics.

So I dragged out a couple of old/cheap eyepieces and used them as a test.

When I had smeared some of this across the surface of a coated eyepiece with a bit of cotton wool, I had a look at that surface under a magnifying glass: it seemed to me that the alcohol had dissolved/melted the coating. That was the end of that experiment and the beginning of this thread. Before I go any further with the CCD's can you tell me what you use for cleaning glass elements in your imaging train, and CCDs in particular.

Peter.
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