Capturing The Atom Bomb | Hacker News Reader

Capturing The Atom Bomb

nytimes.com

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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

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

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.

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)

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.

makes me want to buy one of these:

http://www.bomb-shelter.net/individual%20shelter%20systems.h...

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

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.

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.

Not to disagree, but I wonder how many of them got cancer or some after effect where no one bothered to make the correlations.

My Grandmother, while in the Canadian Airforce, was subjected to radiation tests(She and others were placed in a bunker during these tests). 60 years later when I look back upon the health problems she went through I can't help but wonder if there was a link. Of course no one, in my family, ever brought it up or even discussed the possibility.

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...

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!

I remember hearing about "The Conqueror" from my parents:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conqueror_(film)#Cancer_con...

"Among the 220 or so cast and crew who filmed the 1956 film, The Conqueror, on location near St. George, Utah, ninety-one had come down with cancer, with an unheard of 41 percent morbidity rate, including stars John Wayne, Susan Hayward, and Agnes Moorehead, and director Dick Powell. The film was shot in Southwestern Utah, east of and generally downwind from where the U.S. Government had tested nuclear weapons in Southeastern Nevada, and many contend that radioactive fallout from these tests contaminated the film location and poisoned the film crew working there."

I don't know about photographers or famous people but the Pacific Proving Grounds contaminated several islands in the area. Many neighboring residents have higher rates of cancer and birth defects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Proving_Grounds#Remedia...

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