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Engineers Create the Blackest Material Yet (phys.org)
schwit1 writes: Researchers have created the least reflective material ever made, using as inspiration the scales on the all-white cyphochilus beetle. The result was an extremely tiny nanoparticle rod resting on an equally tiny nanoparticle sphere (30 nm diameter) which was able to absorb approximately 98 to 99 percent of the light in the spectrum between 400 and 1,400nm, which meant it was able to absorb approximately 26 percent more light than any other known material — and it does so from all angles and polarizations.
Coating the inside of high end telescopes and related equipment to reduce stray reflections.
Not just telescopes, but just about any precision optical instrument that has to deal with low light signals and stray light issues.
For one example, there are spectrometers that look at scattered from a laser beam, and filter out the wavelength of light associated with the laser itself. For high precision work, filters can't filter out a narrow enough part of the spectrum, so some will break the light up with a diffraction grating and use a physical object to block the part of the spectrum associated with the laser line. But usually there is too much reflected light from this bouncing around, so the result is much more complicated schemes using multiple diffraction gratings to split up the light and recombine it so it can be spatially filtered to remove stray light and then spread out again for measurement. With a dark enough coating on the object blocking part of the spectra and insides of the spectrometer, a simple, common single grating spectrometer could be used.