Harold Edgerton built a special lens 10 feet long for his camera which was set up in a bunker 7 miles from the source of the blast which was triggered Nevada – the bomb placed atop a steel gantry anchored to the desert floor by guide wires. The exposures are at 1/100,000,000ths of a second.
Click on this link to see more amazing pictures.
For Kindle and with free ePub version. Only $9.49 Great reading.
Here is what Gary Shapiro CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) said: Dvorak's writing sings with insight and clarity. Whether or not you agree with John's views, he will get you thinking and is never boring. These essays are worth the read!
Subscribe to Main Blog feed here:
Subscribe to Comments too (below):
Bad Behavior has blocked 4226 access attempts in the last 7 days.
Woah.
Or woe, as the case may be.
RBG
The tower is anchored by guy wires, not “guide wires”.
Those are truly unbelievable pictures! They are so foreign looking to my eyes that they appear fake…
There is nothing more cool than a nuclear explosion.
There’s an old Asimov short story about this type of thing though. We’re supposed to see the devil standing in the fireball laughing.
Very cool photos.
In Tom Clancy’s “Sum of All Fears” there are several pages devoted to the very short duration of the nuclear explosion. Not being an expert in the field I have no idea how close to real it was but it made fine reading.
While the photos are cool, I am more amazed at how he got that fast an exposure. 1 millionth of a second is very, very fast. As I understand, most fast photography use an open shutter and a timed strobe light.
Is there an extra zero in the headline and shouldn’t it be 1/100,000,000th of a second? They are extraordinary photos.
The power of a bean burrito in the morning.
1/100,000,000 is one one-hundred millionth of a second.
1/1,000,000 is one millionth.
An awesomely short exposure. How did he do it?
Strange to know how many lives can be snuffed out in a millionth of a second, but I guess if ya gotta go, you’d never know it happened, I guess, (scratching head).
@10, Harrison,
I’ve seen camera designs with rapidly rotating prisms and moving film measured in tens, maybe even hundreds of meters/sec, but nanosecond photography is difficult and expensive. I’m also wondering how these photos were taken.
Wish I knew the aperture of the lens used so I could calculate the f-ratio. A standard 8 inch aperture Schmidt-Cass has an f-ratio of 10.0, resulting in a focal length of 6.7 ft. I doubt that light gathering was a major problem capturing a nuclear explosion, but could have been for exposure times in the 10-100 nanosecond range.
Puzzling but very cool. Thanks, Gasparrini.
WOOT!!
looks kinda like what happens to marshmallow’s in the microwave
Current tech can deliver femtosecond light pulses.
Femtosecond = one quadrillionth of a second.
(1/1,000,000,000,000,000) That’s too small to even comprehend.
#15, Harrison, wow, light only travels about 0.3 microns in a femtosecond. That is hard to comprehend. Isn’t it amazing that we’re about midway in size between atoms and galaxies and we try to understand both? I still would like to know how those pix were taken.
#14, Alix, thanks for the link.
http://www.nims.go.jp/ldynamics/HS.html
Seems that our universe is endless in both directions.
Yes to all that have a difficult time understanding anything more then 1,000,000 or less then 1/1,000,000. I guess it is sort of like how they get the caramel in the Cadbury Caramilk Bars*.
(*A Canadian thing)