

Capturing The Atom Bomb - bl4k
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/09/14/science/20100914_atom.html?ref=science

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RiderOfGiraffes
A colleague of mine from university used to study various things using a C4
rotating mirror camera that was originally designed to film atomic explosions.
The film is in a circle around a centrally located rotating mirror. Between
the film and the mirror is a barrier with 140 lenses, and another barrier with
140 slits. As the image gets flung around by the mirror it's mostly projected
onto the barrier with the slits, but sometimes falls on the slit. There it
goes through the associated lens and gets focused on the film.

The camera takes 140 photos in a millisecond, giving a 7 micro-second inter-
frame time. The experiment is done in complete darkness, and is set to trigger
a flash of less than 1 milli-second. The camera has to be loaded and unloaded
by feel in complete darkness.

The camera itself runs at a pretty high vacuum to allow the mirror to be
reasonably large and spin at 60,000 rpm. The flash has to be pretty bright,
and is fed by a 0.5 farad capacitor charged to about 10,000 volts.

The whole setup has to be driven from outside the room for safety reasons, but
you don't want to be in there when the flash goes off. You can see it though
the wooden door, and the room is noticeably warmer afterwards.

It's pretty cool.

Edit: Found a photo of it:

<http://www.smf.phy.cam.ac.uk/fsp/Equipment/Cameras.html>

~~~
kjuhyghjk
I worked on the replacement c5, 20 years ago. It ran at 5700 rev/s and had 137
frames in 120deg of the arc. So took 137frames in (0.33/5700)s = 2.4M fps

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superk
I've seen most of these in "Trinity and Beyond" - a movie I cannot recommend
highly enough.

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114728/trailers>

Recently declassified footage... digitally remastered... score by the Moscow
Symphony Orchestra... and narrated by William Shatner -- so good in a
horrifying way.

~~~
elblanco
Fun note: the composer of the music is the same guy that wrote the music for
this game. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(video_game)>

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djhworld
Superb, surreal photography there, the audio is a nice touch as well as it
gives you some context to the people who were there experiencing the real
horror of what this sort of technology is capable of.

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whyme
makes me want to buy one of these:

[http://www.bomb-
shelter.net/individual%20shelter%20systems.h...](http://www.bomb-
shelter.net/individual%20shelter%20systems.html)

I've also been watching Jericho and LOST lately, which is probably a factor
too - lol.

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bustamove
Very interesting. Many photographers and famous scientists died because of
this kind of experiments. At that time the effects of radiations were now well
know.

~~~
hugh3
How many photographers, and which famous scientists in particular?

edit: I'm not just being a dick, I'm just not aware of significant numbers of
casualties from nuclear tests, and certainly not among famous scientists.
Here's what seems to be a complete list of known casualties from nuclear
testing:

<http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/tests/index.html>

The death rate from US nuclear tests appears to be one dude who died due to
fallout at Bikini Atoll (eighteen years after the actual test) and one dude
who fell into a collapsing pit at a test site in Nevada.

~~~
Lazlo_Nibble
That's the death rate that can be clearly and unambiguously tied to something
that happened during a test. The problem is that deaths due to radiation
exposure can take place years or decades after that exposure, and the data
needed to clearly connect the two is often classified, lost, or was never
gathered in the first place. At best, you'll uncover a statistical correlation
(e.g., the ten cases of leukemia recorded in later years among the troops who
were present at the Smokey shot, where only four would be statistically
expected).

Having said that, I suspect that the number of folks who died as a direct
result of exposure during tests _that they participated in_ was relatively
small, particularly compared to what happened to the folks who lived downwind
of the NTS during the atmospheric-testing era. The troops in the Desert Rock
exercises were in and out in hours -- but the downwinders lived in fallout
contaminated areas for extended periods of time, ate food raised on or grown
in contaminated soil, etc. And then there's the cast and crew of _The
Conquerer_...

~~~
kjuhyghjk
The same thing happened for British tests near Australia - although there was
an increase in cancers of those present for the tests it was determined that
this was due to the control group (soldier not at at the tests) were
unnaturally healthy!

