text: Stray light is unwanted wavelength radiation reaching the incorrect detector element. It generates erroneous electronic counts not related to designed spectral signal for the pixel or element of the detector array. It can come from light scatter and reflection of imperfect optical elements as well as higher order diffraction effects. The second order effect can be removed or at least dramatically reduced, by installing order sorting filters before the detector. 
  A Si detectors sensitivity to visible and NIR is nearly an order of magnitude larger than that in the UV range. This means that the pixels at the UV spectral position respond to stray light in visible and NIR much more strongly than to their own designed spectral signal. Therefore, the stray light impacts in UV region are much more significant as compared to visible and NIR pixels. This situation gets worse the shorter the wavelength. 
  When measuring broad band light with small fraction of UV signals, the stray light impact can sometimes be dominant in the UV range since the detector pixels are already struggling to get enough UV signals from the source. For this reason, calibration using QTH standard lamp can have huge errors (more than 100%) below 350 nm and Deuterium standard lamp is required for more accurate calibration in this region. In fact, absolute light measurement in the UV region can have large errors even with the correct calibration when majority of the electronic counts in these pixels is result of the stray light (longer wavelength strikes instead of the actual UV light).