Fairy light infinity mirror

We have previously made an infinity mirror using a play dough circuit and LEDs. Whilst this was fun, the low conductivity of the play dough meant we could only use a handful of LEDs. With battery-powered Christmas LED light chains readily available in the pound shop, I thought that we could try and improve on our infinity mirror.

The infinity mirror uses a normal mirror, and a mirror which reflects most of the light but transmits a small proportion. The resulting effect is that light 'bounces' back and forth between the mirrors repeatedly, creating many images of any LED lights between the mirrors.

Fairy light infinity mirror - the effect is more impressive than our play dough version

The fairy lights I bought have 20 LEDs in the string, and we stuck them to the mirrors using play dough. Blu tack would probably work better, but it's what I had to hand! The small boy helped me to stick the lights around the periphery of one mirror and to put the partially transparent mirror on top. He was very excited by the infinity mirror he created, and enjoyed experimenting by taking the top mirror on and off, or having it partially on such that he could see the difference it made to the reflections.

Top mirror half on and half off - you can see the difference it makes to the reflections

My son also wanted to experiment with putting other objects in the middle, illuminated by the LEDs. He was particularly taken by the reflections of a lolly stick, and enjoyed counting them with and without the top mirror on.  The pictures don't quite do it justice as some of the repeated reflections don't show up on the images because the initial ones are so bright (plus there are a lot of small fingerprints on the mirrors).

Lolly stick infinity mirror

This was a fun variation on something we had done several weeks before, reusing the same mirrors (see my previous blog for how I made the partially transparent one). He was more into experimentation this time, which was nice to watch, and I think he's probably learnt a little more about how it works.

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