If you haven't experienced a spinthariscope, I can highly recommend it. I bought one as a Christmas present for a buddy and we both enjoy its demonstration of radioactivity.
A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity
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Re: A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity
#12Don't miss a chance to see the Cherenkov radiation effect at your local research reactor.
Re: A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity
#13Re: A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Potassium-40 is not an alpha emitter.
That's unrelated. He's been diligently substituting bananas in many experiments to mostly disappointment.
The banhattan project has been a fiasco.
Chicago Peel 1 accomplished fission of fruit flies, which we felt was promising.
The subsequent banana nuclear bomb tests have been an unmitigated disaster. There are so many damn bananas in and around the bikini atolls, just nothing. Not even a fizzle. Mojave is littered with peels. Oppenheimer slipped and broke his leg.
Rumors are the Soviets are using avocados. Maybe that is the key. We are now constructing a demon core from an avocado split lengthwise.
Re: A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity
#15https://dberard.com/home-built-stm/ shows individual atoms.
Re: A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's unrelated. He's been diligently substituting bananas in many experiments to mostly disappointment.
The banhattan project has been a fiasco. Chicago Peel 1 accomplished fission of fruit flies, which we felt was promising. The subsequent banana nuclear bomb tests have been an unmitigated disaster. There are so many damn bananas in and around the bikini atolls, just nothing. Not even a fizzle. Mojave is littered with peels. Oppenheimer slipped and broke his leg. Rumors are the Soviets are using avocados. Maybe that i…
This puts Raffi in a whole new light. Also maybe the Banana ball team are refugee all-stars.
Re: A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity
#17If you haven't experienced a spinthariscope, I can highly recommend it. I bought one as a Christmas present for a buddy and we both enjoy its demonstration of radioactivity.
UnitedNuclear has these and a bunch of other interesting tidbits if anyone wants to give it a try. I bought a small bottle of heavy water as well, which I of course sampled and can confirm it has a slightly sweet taste to it.
You really have to get your eyes adjusted to the dark to see anything with the spinthariscope. It ends up looking mostly like static on a green crt, but if your only reference frame is a cloud chamber, the volume of particles that are emitted from such a weak source is pretty remarkable.
Re: A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity
#18I was hoping this would be an artists project page describing the passive imaging of radiation (i.e. not a simple X-ray scan).
Imagine a planar array where each pixel gathers counts like an MCA (multichannel analyzer), mounted in some lead pinhole camera obscura.
This would give an extremely wide range of channels didactically illustrating the presence of calcium in gypsum (dryboard etc), visually show backscatter, etc.
Such pictures of modern and old city scenes would be mesmerizing to watch, partially seeing into buildings, the ground, ...
Re: A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity
#19I was hoping this would be an artists project page describing the passive imaging of radiation (i.e. not a simple X-ray scan). Imagine a planar array where each pixel gathers counts like an MCA (multichannel analyzer), mounted in some lead pinhole camera obscura. This would give an extremely wide range of channels didactically illustrating the presence of calcium in gypsum (dryboard etc), visually show backscatter, e…
currently trying to make a flip-dot display (think https://theartistbreakfast.com/works/spectral-flashbacks-ser...) but with some kind of radiation detector behind each pixel that will flip the dot when something passes through
i made a small 3x3 proof of concept using more expensive geiger tubes, and their really long 'z-axis' lengths made 'traces' happen very often, like a persistent cloud chamber
trying to find a reliable semiconductor (read:cheaper) method i can scale to an arbitrary number of pixels, but something seems to happen in between the bench and the wall :(
Re: A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity
#20I was hoping this would be an artists project page describing the passive imaging of radiation (i.e. not a simple X-ray scan). Imagine a planar array where each pixel gathers counts like an MCA (multichannel analyzer), mounted in some lead pinhole camera obscura. This would give an extremely wide range of channels didactically illustrating the presence of calcium in gypsum (dryboard etc), visually show backscatter, e…
Takes a while to do an entire continent this way, luckily when you start in the 1970s it's all over by now.
* https://www.ga.gov.au/bigobj/GA13928.pdf
* https://www.ga.gov.au/bigobj/GA18007.pdf
Visualising full 256 channel multispectral data can be tricky, the approach taken above was to take the raw data and process it to create a false colour RGB image representing the strength and interaction between natural background potassium, thorium, and uranium.