The Parker Shaft of the Franklin Mine is the type and only known locality for esperite (unless you count specimens dispersed in the dumps as other “localities”) apart from the El Dragón mine in Bolivia. It was apparently locally abundant in the Parker shaft, but overall extremely rare in the mine – now long gone.
Esperite is one of the brightest fluorescent minerals from Franklin, but not easy to photograph accurately. (I have never seen a specimen from Bolivia and have no idea if material from there fluoreseces as well.)
The first pair of photos is probably the most accurate – the esperite looks lemony yellow as it should. The other photos are earlier attempts and the eperite came out a bit too “canary” yellow and even a bit orangey. The willemite in all the photos came out a bit to “grass green”.
The first UV photo was made using ISO 200 at f8 with a 30 second exposure and AWB. The result didn’t look much like anything. But Photoshop “autolevels” immediately gave me an acceptable photo.
Of course, with SW, you can make esperite (or whatever) look as bright as you want. Will it look that bright in real life? All I can say is that, even with my wimpy UV source, it looks impressively bright and that the esperite is just about as bright as the willemite. This is a very good, rich, specimen of esperite.
In addition to the the esperite and willemite, there is franklinite, a large anhedral crystal of arsenopyrite or löllingite and some unidentified massive brown stuff.
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