One of my favorite photographers on one of my favorite photographic subjects: the tremendously elusive (thank god) nuclear fission reaction. I’ve seen various shots on cobwebsites, but to my knowledge nobody has collected them in one place. (If anyone has more or higher quality images please comment.)
These impossible sights were captured by “Doc” Edgerton in 1952 at a distance of 7 miles (11.2km) using his recently invented rapatronic camera. He was an electrical engineer from MIT turned photographer and utilized an interesting technique to avoid slow mechanical parts in a shutter. Edgerton co-founded EG&G based on his work and it currently employs 11,000 for NASA and US defense contracts.
The first photo is approximately 1 millisecond after detonation while the blast diameter was 20m. The exposures are (ostensibly) 1,000,000,000/sec., or 10ns. In the later photos you can see rope effect; effectively vaporization of material traveling down the cables and trellising. Unlike modern high-speed photography only one shot could be taken per camera and Doc set up 10 cameras for this blast. I’m missing six photos…
Recent Comments