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racerab, johnleonardphoto, Nickolas and 7 others like this
These are some of the most remarkable pictures I have ever come across. I first saw them about 10 years ago, and I just today stumbled on them again. This is a nuclear fireball captured just milliseconds after detonation. A new technology had to be invented to take these photographs, the Rapatronic Camera. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera
Since it is challenging to make a mechanical shutter move fast enough to take an image with an exposure time of a few microseconds, a magneto-optical shutter is used instead. A brief change in a magnetic field is used to alter the polarization of the light coming from the fireball, allowing it to pass through two orthogonal polarization filters.
Disturbingly beautiful.
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Nickolas 9 years, 10 months ago
Thank you for sharing. Great info and images. I was in 7th grade and decided to do a school paper on the Atomic Bomb from WWII. I had read Richard Rhodes books on the subject and was fascinated by it. I made scale models of Fat Man and Little Boy. At the time we were still in the 80's and the heat of the Cold War. I received a good grade by the teach wrote to my parents "maybe we should talk about this topic". Looking back I think my teacher looked at me as though I was doing a topic on Torture in the Dark Ages. :-/
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