Here are some photos a few microseconds after an atomic explosion by Harold Edgerton. “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.” [via] Link. For some slightly safer high speed photography, check out our kit from MAKE volume 04.
12 thoughts on “Atomic blast photos”
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Hmm, I saw the same images yesterday on boingboing.net only the link was to http://www.nevadasurveyor.com/atomicbomb/ a site with no ads.
Today on Makeblog we have the same images with slighty different text – along with a whole lot of ads.
Too bad ’cause the Nevada Surveyor man is clearly one of us!
Jake.
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jake, i saw it on the site i [via]’ed first, thanks for adding that link, comments are great for stuff like that.
one thing jake, our comment system doesn’t like your 3 links, it’s usually spam. so if you post and i’m not around to manually approve, you might not see your comments, just a fyi.
Oh! I didn’t mean to criticize! It is an interesting example of how a meme travels the net though.
Mark posted it to boingboing.net yesterday:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/15/photo_of_an_hbomb_tr.html
he sites:
http://www.neatorama.com/2006/02/11/harold-edgertons-atomic-bomb-detonation-photos/
which points back to:
http://www.nevadasurveyor.com/atomicbomb/
Since the url:
http://www.rapidnewswire.com/atom.htm
is not indexed by Google yet and http://www.nevadasurveyor.com/atomicbomb/ is my guess is someone saw Nevada Survey guy’s page, lifted the pictures and text, added a bunch of advertising and sent a tickler to news.com who published the link that you saw.
Apropos of nothing, I met Harold Edgerton ages ago when, as a young pup, I worked at EG&G Environmental Systems, he was a gentleman to be sure.
Jake.
Did anyone else notice how these photos have the same sort of quality that electron microscope pictures have?
Is just because they are both monochromatic with limited dynamic range or is there some sort of congruity between the very small and the very quick?
Just ramblin’
Jake.
how does the saying go? not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we -can- imagine.
Wonder how these would have turned out if the film didn’t melt in a few spots