Hacker News Reader

Comment by netsharc | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the radiation after Chernobyl causing flashes on the physical film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOLBEx5DBaE

View on HN

Seeing visible light flashes in the scintillator was one of oldest ways how we observed ionizing radiation. It's more then 100 years old method.

"This built upon the work of earlier researchers such as Antoine Henri Becquerel, who discovered radioactivity whilst working on the phosphorescence of uranium salts in 1896. Previously, scintillation events had to be laboriously detected by eye, using a spinthariscope (a simple microscope) to observe light flashes in the scintillator."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillation_counter

Also the sobering footage taken by this YouTuber by sending a GoPro through a particle accelerator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf4Ux4SlyT4

The video is not exactly comfortable to watch, but the sound is truly scary.

ahh I love that! YouTube compression not doing it justice

thought it was onboarding day at Black Mesa all over again for a few minutes there..

Can anyone tell whether these exposures occurred through the camera lens (from fallout particles in the sky of the depicted scenes) or in post- (or pre-) exposure handling of the film from hot dust carried by the photographer?

There's no reason they would preferentially travel through the lens and hit the current frame because most of the camera and film housing is about as transparent to gamma radiation as glass. Or maybe more transparent, because glass lenses in pro cameras tend to be rather bulky.

So this just happened somewhere between arrival to and departure from the zone.

They are not part of the image of the scene. They wouldn't be focused by the optics.

The optics would just be a slight attenuation much like the rest of the camera housing, film reel, operator, etc. So really a summation of all the exposure types you can imagine.

thank you so much for this link! I have been trying to search for footage of this phenomenon (in the pre-llm era) 10+y ago

I suppose I got lucky with the search terms on YouTube, I remember watching a documentary showing the first sight of the reactor filmed from a helicopter, and the narrator saying "The flashes of light on the footage are due to radiation". I was hoping to find this heli video on YouTube, but all the "chernobyl heli" footage are from the TV series, or very very low res. The video above isn't what I was looking for, but it shows the effects of radiation very well.

Sheesh, but DuckDuckGo and Google are quite useless. I just tried to see if The Internet has a record of the heli that flew to Chernobyl to shoot that first footage of the blown reactor (IIRC from Moscow, although that does not seems a plausible flying distance), and the search engines think I want to instead find out about the heli that crashed after hitting a crane...

The corona monitoring satellite cameras "blink" on incoming xray flares.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com