The website is an online tool designed to help you identify minerals according to their observable properties. There are two main sections, corresponding to two different microscope setups:

• Identifying minerals under transmitted light
• Identifying minerals under reflected light

This website has been an endeavour to compilate facts from different places, such as books, personal experience, the wider internet etc., hopefully making this place a one-stop-shop for all your geological microscopy needs and saving you precious time and effort.

For reference, we have also included a definitions section with simple explanations in plain english. Check out our tutorial to walk you through things.

Visit our Sources and Resources page to learn more about where we get the info from. Not only that, we encourage you to go beyond into the literature and check out the other cool resources we suggest.

We are two friends, one geologist and the other not, that wanted to learn to build a website from scratch. What better time to do it than during the Covid-19 lockdown while we were both doing our PhDs. We chose this project as the geologist really wished he had had something like this when he used to spend his undergraduate hours looking under a microscope and flipping through many different mineral database books.

We are not professional developers and are learning as we go along. We are working hard to finish and improve this resource, so please bear with us.

If you have anything to say, good or bad, please don't hesitate to get in touch at contact@namethatmineral.com