I was taking a lovely constitutional around the halls of MIT a few weeks back (and let me tell you, that place is BIG– check it out)…
Anyhoo, I came upon an exhibit showcasing the stroboscopic work of Harold Eugene “Doc” Edgerton, who was an MIT professor for years. You’ve probably seen these pictures; the strobe allowed Doc to capture very minute moments in time.
But have you see these? These I had not seen.
At first I couldn’t tell what they were. Blobby… scary.
They were taken by Doc with his Rapatropic camera in 1952. At an atomic test site in Nevada.
Wikipedia tells us more:
The rapatronic camera is a high-speed camera capable of recording a still image with an exposure time as brief as 10 nanoseconds (billionths of a second).
The camera was developed by Harold Edgerton in the 1940s and was first used to photograph the rapidly-changing matter in nuclear explosions within milliseconds of ignition. To overcome the speed limitation of a conventional camera’s mechanical shutter, the rapatronic camera uses two polarizing filters and a Kerr cell.The two filters are mounted with their polarization angles at 90° toeach other, to block all incoming light. The Kerr cell between thefilters, which changes the polarization of light passing through itwhen energized, acts as shutter when it is energized at the right timefor a very short amount of time, allowing the film to be properlyexposed.
For a film-like sequence of high-speed photographs, as used in the photography of nuclear and thermonuclear tests, arrays of up to 12 cameras were deployed, with each camera carefully timed to record a different time frame.
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HOLY KERPLOSION, batman.
Edgerton is one of my heroes. SO many innovations in imaging, including engineering the electronic flash as we know it. I wrote a research paper on him and on Etienne-Jules Marey in college.
I love Dr. Edgerton, I read that book that came out in the 80′s over and over again as a kid.
At Golf Magazine we had a photographer who had been at the magazine for almost it’s whole history. He had worked with Dr. Edgerton at MIT and there is a cool picture of them together. He brought that into the magazine by taking stroboscopic long strip images of golfers swinging golf clubs..they are really beautiful images. The photographers name is Leonard Kamsler, and he did some great scientific golf images..Golf Magazine prints them all again and again over the years.
Off topic, but in case you hadn’t seen this yet … http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2009/04/behind_photographs.html?ps=bb1
What an interesting man… I saw one of his images back when I was a child, and had it taped to my bedroom wall for quite some time. I am always in awe of people who master the technical side of photography; his innovations are numerous and impressive.
Really great an interesting pictures of from Dr. Edgerton. I have never seen the pics before. The first picture with the card and the bullet – absolutely amazing. Lets try that
[...] the last pictures are from Dr Edgerton and his Raptronic camera, via Rachel Hulin. The piece is by me, let me know if you want to use it. I also took out formal citations and [...]