I recently discovered through the EverydayScientist that those cool powerful green laser pointers we all like to play with may be putting out IR on the same line! A study performed by the NIST found that some of the commonly sold green lasers on sites like ebay may have their IR blocking filter removed, which saves money for the manufacturer, but also might produce IR emissions.
Here’s a neat way they came up with to test for IR in the field. Bsaically they use a CD as a diffraction grating. They also show how to modify a webcam to pick up IR, but as most of us have an IR sensitive camera on our microscope, we could easily hook up a macro lens to our camera and see what we get!