I have a luminescent playa project in mind and have been digging online for suppliers of cyalume (diphenyl oxalate) with no success. My roommate is a biochem grad student and she helped me track down a CAS number (it's 3155-16-6) and compound Id (1198354) for cyalume, and we found some online references attempting to link to suppliers, but the links didn't work (anymore?) We're speculating that there's some legal disincentive to distribute the stuff directly to consumers, but I'd be psyched if someone finds a source.

In lieu of the pure cyalume liquid, I'm thinking of just busting the tops off of a bunch of glowsticks without breaking the hydrogen peroxide sheath inside, gathering the cyalume + fluorescent dye mixtures from several glowsticks into a single container, and then mixing the hydrogen peroxide/DOP solution in later. seems backasswards, but might work for what i'm doing.

alternatively--and more in the spirit of the green man/renewable energy idea--several vendors supply photoluminescent powder, which creates mixtures that glow for 10-12 hours from just being exposed to light, without a chemical reaction, and works over and over again for several years. i just ordered some from 'ready set glo' (tinyurl.com/3dq8e6) to test how bright of a glow we're really talking about here. i'm skeptical, but the site claims that these days photoluminescent powder glows 10x brighter than those old glow-in-the-dark stars you had on your ceiling as a kid.