So, last May I took a drive over to Republic Airport with some old friends from college and took some photos of the planes landing and taking off. Republic is a nice small airport that doesn’t serve any major airlines, so nobody really cared that we were there shooting. Highlight of the trip was when a Gulfstream V (tail number N501CV) landed, loaded/unloaded and taxied back out for take off. Luckily, I got a nice shot of the jet with the thrust reversers deployed. Unluckily, I was using my 75-300mm lens, which is about as sharp as soft serve ice cream on the surface of the sun… But I think I salvaged it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The reason I’m posting this so late is because I never processed it until now, I was just trying out a trial of Lightroom 4 (since my coworkers insist I live in the Dark Ages using Bridge and Camera Raw…) so I thought I’d process this one. I also experimented with the watermarking editor in the export module. I have to say, Lightroom does deliver on the ease of use, and the before/after preview panel is immensely helpful, something I wished ACR/Bridge had time and again.

So, there you have it, N501CV, enjoy!

EDIT: Came up with another nice shot, thought I’d add it here:

So, when I switched from compact point and shoot cameras (like my beat up venerable Canon PowerShot A2000 IS) to my trusty DSLR (a Canon EOS Rebel T2i)  I knew I was getting more control over the exposure in terms of shutter speed and aperture control, a variety of lens options and an excellent high resolution sensor and optical system. However, I did manage to overlook the considerably improved performance with high ISO settings. Compact cameras had drilled in to my head that anything over ISO 400 was effectively useless due to randomly colored speckles of noise degrading my images.

Well, that just isn’t true any more! The T2i, while an entry-level and generally low end DSLR, has quite an impressive noise performed compared to my old PowerShot. I emphasize that, because from what I have seen and read, the T2i can’t really hold a candle in noise performance to some of the bigger players (like the Canon 7d, 5d Mark III or 1D), but went put next to even the more modern compacts it has a clear advantage. There are a ton of shots I missed because going past ISO 200 made me cringe so violently I couldn’t get the silly thing to focus!

I’m supposed to be good at this scientific thing aren’t I?

After a while, I started to see some great results from my camera, and others in it’s class, when I bit the bullet and switched to ISO 400, but I was still hesitant. Eventually I got fed up missing shots I’d seen other people get with the same equipment, and when I asked about it, the answer was usually that they pushed the ISO. So, being an engineer, I decided to do something sort of kind of scientific (not really) and get a solid answer to how the camera performed. So, I set the camera up on a tripod, and picked a nearby object with a fair amount of color, and white (an Aleve bottle) and plunked it down on a table. I zoomed and focused the camera on it, and then using the 2 second timer, and very careful hand motions I shot 7 photos as similarly as possible, on aperture priority, at ISO 100 to ISO 6400. I’ll go over my results below, but for the photographers out there, I warn you, I didn’t level the photos, I didn’t correct the white balance, I didn’t tweak the curves or the contrast, and most importantly I didn’t run any noise reduction. I did crop them in to squares for ease of comparison, so let’s get started:

ISO 100

First up, ISO 100, every digital photographers friend when it comes to noise, it is generally the cleanest, or very close to the cleanest. It’s wonderful on bright sunny days when there is a buckets of light and you’re shooting at f/11.0 and not a care in the world. Let’s go the instant replay:

From T2i ISO Test

Now, forgiving the boring subject and silly composition, this photo looks pretty good. The white part of the bottle shows no obvious signs of noise speckling, and I can’t find any without some fairly hefty inspection, much more beyond anything anyone would do just trying to view a photograph. So ISO 100, quite obviously, is extremely usable from a noise perspective. Honestly though, I knew that already, and really only took this test shot as a baseline.

ISO 200

Alright, got your shutter finger warmed up, you’re snapping away, but it’s a little dim out because of the clouds and you’ve got a big group of family members that just won’t stand shoulder to shoulder, so the aperture has to stay down a few stops. If they’re anything like my family, they always won’t stand still! So you might need to kick up to ISO 200 to keep your shutter speed family freezing fast. Let’s see how it holds up:

From T2i ISO Test

Subject is no better, composition is still silly, and this photo also looks pretty good. Again, the white of the bottle looks clear, no obvious speckling. Again, you can find the noise if you really, really go looking, but it’s not relevant. So, ISO 200, again very usable from a noise perspective. On a side note, the colors seem to have come out a bit punchier on this exposure. Not sure if that was the ISO or if I moved and changed a shadow or something…. so not the most scientific study, but close enough I think!

ISO 400

Alright, up until now we’ve been playing in amateur land, easy bright lighting, aperture fairly wide, easy subjects, now let’s get in to a dim indoor room with so-so lighting. You’ve got a problem now, time to kick it up a notch. ISO 400 here we come:

From T2i ISO Test

So, this is the point where in my experience compact cameras start to get obviously noisy, and I’ve never really pushed one past this point. For the DSLR I find ISO 400 very usable. If you zoom in, the noise is not so well hidden, if you’re looking for it, but if you’re just enjoying the photo, it’s not there, it doesn’t soften up any edges, and I honestly probably couldn’t identify an ISO 400 shot next to an ISO 200 shot without some squinting or EXIF data. Again, this is before any noise reduction as well. I think ISO 400 is still a very usable option, and it gives you a leg up when lighting is getting less cooperative.

ISO 800

Here’s where the party starts to get going, it’s late, it’s dark, your subject is not cooperating, you need a fast shutter, your aperture isn’t getting wider, give that little knob a twist  for ISO 800:

From T2i ISO Test

Alright, for me, this is the first ISO level I can see noise without having to blow the image up. That said, I can only see it because I know I took the shot at ISO 800, I know it’s there to look for, and it’s very easy to overlook. That said, it really doesn’t bother me, at least not as much as missing a cool shot because I hesitated about pushing the ISO. Still usable!

ISO 1600

Massive citywide blackout, no lights! Ok, not really, but it’s getting pretty dark, you need to keep the shutter speed up, you’re out of options, click it up again. This is the kind of ISO setting you’d use in a dark bar at your buddies bachelor party, or a concert, or a school play… especially if you can’t use flash. So, playing the part of adequate light in tonights production of “Bachelor Party”, is ISO 1600:

From T2i ISO Test

Like ISO 800, you can see the noise at normal viewing sizes, and it’s a bit more obvious here, but if the photo is compelling and the composition isn’t terrible, it probably won’t detract too much, and this is again, without noise reduction! At this point, there is some visible definition loss on the sharp edges, but a little noise reduction, a little unsharp mask, and we’re laughing. Personally, this is the highest setting I’ll use on the DSLR, I wouldn’t even bring a compact camera in to this ballpark, and I find it gives you pretty good latitude on lighting. If you’re still not able to expose properly, and have the option, it’s definitely time to consider alternative lighting, if you haven’t yet caved on it. If you’re stuck with that lighting, this may be your only option, but it’s far from a terrible one!

ISO 3200

Same city wide blackout, but there are now zombies… 28 Days Later zombies, which are unnervingly fast! Now, for any good photographer, getting the right exposure is clearly more important than surviving the zombie apocalypse, so what to do? Well, push the ISO to 3200 of course! Need a good sharp picture of that creature coming to dine on your jugular after all…

From T2i ISO Test

See, an Aleve bottle? Not so terrifying. The noise on this photo is though. It is clearly visible against the solid white of the bottle, it chews up the label making it look soft and permeates the background. If you have no other option, ISO 3200 will probably get you the shot, but it may not be one that you’re particularly desiring. Of course depending on your subject, heavy noise reduction and resharpening may be a completely acceptable course of action, especially if you’re working with something that doesn’t have a lot of fine detail to show off. So it’s not a total loss, but if it comes down to you facing off against a non-Romero zombie with nothing but a camera… just walk away.

ISO 6400

This is mostly here for completeness, I mean who gets all the way to ISO 6400 and just goes home? The last of the native ISOs you con get without turning on expansion, 6400 is pretty much there to make abstract art out of an image. I have never actually used this setting and kept the photo. The amount of denoising and sharpening required to counteract the effect pretty much ruins a photo for me, so I don’t see much point in this setting:

From T2i ISO Test

Sure, you can see the Aleve bottle, and read the label, but its noticeably soft and noisy all over the image. I can’t really see much use for this setting, if you’re in lighting conditions that terrible you need to just pony up and get a flash or something, unless you really are not going to be allowed, then I would suggest a tripod and longer exposures.

Conclusions

I hope this article has given you Rebel owners (and potential owners) a good idea of what kind of ISO performance you can expect from your camera. As I said earlier, it blows away my old point and shoot, and I am learning to embrace the higher levels available to me to improve my photography. Personally, the absolute most I’ll use on my camera is ISO 1600, preferably not passing 800, but I don’t bat an eye going up to 400, and only hesitate a little pushing it to 800. I will use ISO 1600 only if 800 feels hopeless to me. I’m also evaluating some programs like Imagenomic Noiseware with the trial version, and I find it works quite well. I may be inclined to purchase it after playing with it some more, currently I do see a fair amount of what looks like JPEG compression artifacts forming around finer details in the noise reduced image, but I strongly suspect that’s me bungling up a setting!

So there you have it, T2i ISO Noise in a nutshell (or in this case, Aleve bottle)!

Its that time of year again, I’ve been going to the Summer Sunday tours at Brookhaven National Laboratory, specifically I attended:

• Dazzling Light, Astounding Discoveries on July 22nd, this was a tour of the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS for short) facility, and it’s younger, bigger brother, the NSLS II currently under construction.
• Atom Smashing Fun on August 5th, this was a tour of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC for short, scientists sure love their acronyms!) facility, and the detector systems that they work with there.

The same weekend as the RHIC tour, I also went to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum with some old college buddies, and saw the Enterprise Space Shuttle prototype, as well as some of my favorite aircraft, and of course, the aircraft carrier itself!

And of course, I took a lot of photos! At the end of each section are four of my favorites, and a link to the albums hosting the rest. Note that NSLS and RHIC share an album. Also, for the RHIC and Intrepid trips, I made use of a new purchase: The RS-Sport 2 strap from Black Rapid. See the end of this post for my brief review of the strap.

National Synchrotron Light Source I & II

First up, the NSLS I/II tours! I took this tour with my old roommates Matt (no jokes please) and Allen. For Matt and myself (Don’t. Every joke, every pun, done to death. Seriously.) we had some expectations, because we had taken this tour last year, so for us there was a bar set pretty high.

In a nutshell, the NSLS facilities take bunches of electrons and accelerate them in to (relatively) tight circles, very very near the speed of the light. This causes a strong angular acceleration on the particles, which causes them to throw off the aptly named synchrotron radiation, which is energy all over the electromagnetic spectrum, such as X-rays. This is used to study very small things, things that cannot be otherwise observed because visible light particles are too large to resolve the details being sought out. The big benefits of these machines is that they provide a (relatively) wide spectrum of light, at a fairly constant level.

So, compared to last year, this years tours fell a little flat for Matt and I, mainly due to the increased brevity and considerable lower depth of detail involved. Last year, the tour guides at both the NSLS and NSLS II were very enthusiastic, and extremely informative. This year things were busier, more crowded, much higher level and much more brief. For example, when we took the NSLS I tour last year, our tour was over an hour, and involved a very scientifically inclined group, and a very chatty guide. He answered a lot of questions, got in to a lot of detail of the experiments and how it all worked. He also gave us a great tour of the control room while they were doing an injection of electrons. This year, the tour of the NSLS was about 8 minutes! Also, involved several younger guests that I think were only there for the air conditioning. While very enthusiastic, and quite talented, our tour guide gave us a pretty high level, simplified overview of the whole place. The NSLS II showroom was also quite a bit more crowded than last year, and in general the whole event was very busy this year, compared to last year. While I am happy the lab is gaining more recognition, it is a little frustrating after having the place basically to our nerdy selves last year.

I think the increased crowds, lower detail and generally less engaging environments were not only related, but I think they share some common causes:

• No age recommendation - Last year, the NSLS and RHIC tours included a disclaimer that it was recommended for ages 10+. This year, only the RHIC had that indicator, and as such there were a lot of children at the NSLS sites. This means increased crowds, and much more focus on entertaining children. Now don’t get me wrong, I like kids, but I think the whole concept of the NSLS facilities whizzed right past them. As such, it really didn’t have much of an impact on them, but it did affect our visit unfortunately.
• No barrier to entry on the NSLS I Tour – Last year, there was a little quiz/raffle thing going on to get tickets for the tour of the NSLS I facility. It was easy, it was quick and they gave out tickets fairly freely. However, you had to want to see the NSLS, and be interested in the facility and put in a little effort to get there. This filters out 95% of the people who would take the tour just because they can. This year, the tour was open to the public as another stop along the way. Combine that with the increased crowds, and small children that aren’t terribly interested in the nerdy details, and you get a quick gloss over instead of an in-depth tour.

Despite this, it was still a really interesting tour, and very nice to see the progress of the construction. In the NSLS II facility we did manage to wrangle some wonderful nerd talk out of some of the staff there. Here are some of my favorite photos:

From Brookhaven National Laboratory

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

Next tour, this actually happened after the Intrepid visit described below, but I think it makes sense right after the NSLS section. The RHIC is a perpetually awesome machine, it takes heavy ions (like gold, or now uranium) and accelerates them up very near the speed of light (the guys at Brookhaven seem to like the speed of light) and then slams them in to each other, causing a surprisingly small, but very effective explosion that simulates the Big Bang pretty effectively. These collisions occur at several points around the ring, at different detector sites. The detectors are large sets of scientific instruments of varying types surrounding the collision zone, which detect (hence the name) the results of the collisions.

The tour consisted of buses running guests between the two open detector sites and one of the tunnel entrances. It was a very enjoyable tour, and like NSLS, was one we had taken last year as well. While the detectors featured this year were the same as the ones featured last year, there was some new developments and new configurations of the equipment to see, so it didn’t feel like a rehash. Unfortunately, I do feel the quality of this tour was also somewhat compromised by the crowds, but not to the degree the NSLS tours were. The tour guides were very informative and answered a number of very interesting questions, including some excellent technical specifics, it just felt a bit crowded.

One of the more interesting things about the RHIC operation, is how they use liquid helium to cool the magnets and make them superconductive. Superconductive means the circuit has zero electrical resistance, and is a very unique and difficult to produce quality. This is important because magnets require a very high amount of electric current to generate the magnetic fields required, and electrical resistance not only limits current flow, it causes high current flow to create a lot of heat. Heat makes materials (generally) less conductive, thus increasing the amount of energy lost to heat, causing the material to get hotter…. this is a pretty vicious cycle that often ends with severely damaging the machine. Because of this, it is very important to keep the magnets very very cool, and they have a dedicated refrigeration utility that works full time to sustain those temperatures. Superconducting materials are very cool, and efforts to make them work without requiring dedicated cooling are going on right now. Superconducting wires would revolutionize the way the power grid is designed in countries around the world. Currently, distribution of power from generating stations is limited to the power plants local geographic reason, because the further it has to travel through (non-superconducting) wires, the more energy lost to heat, meaning lower efficiency. It becomes impractical to move a lot of power very far, and limits the effective distribution of power around the world. If wires can be made that were passively superconductive (not requiring support cooling) and cost-effective, electrical power could be generated anywhere and brought wherever it was needed. In addition to increasing the efficiency of power grids in general, it allows more natural power sources to be tapped without them needing to be conveniently located by power consuming civilization.

The other really cool thing about the RHICs functionality is how they observe what is happening. Since the collisions are occurring somewhat randomly, and are very fleeting, they are just about impossible to observe or record directly. Instead the detector sites record everything that happens in the area immediately around the collision, classifying what types of particles and energy are released by the event. Then powerful computers trace these recorded events caused by the collision and backtrack them to predict a model of what the collision was like. This generates an enormous amount of information, that is constantly filtered, tagged and categorized for later study. The computers can also recognize rare events and give them a higher priority billing so they can be analyzed sooner. These functions all happen at the various detectors, each one targeted at observing different types of events.

All in all, another great tour at Brookhaven, and a very enjoyable event, filled with a lot of lovely nerd talking, and some great photo ops!

From Brookhaven National Laboratory

 Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum

This trip was one of my favorites, because while giant atom smashing machines are cool, and flinging electrons is excellent, nothing compares to the wonder of flight for me. I find it fascinating the way we continually devise more and more clever and capable machines to carry us through the skies, and through space. It’s a rush to see the way history has progressed walking through the museum, starting with the propeller driven warplanes and old space capsules below decks, and then seeing the modern jet fighters and the Space Shuttle on the flight deck.

Some of my favorite sites were the old space capsules, including the mock up of a Mercury capsule that Allen and I climbed in for a fun photo op. Another excellent sight was of the Optical Landing System on display below decks. This used a curved mirror and a series of light indicators to guide pilots in to a landing on the carrier deck. The curved mirror had a light shown on it from off axis, and everything was aligned so a plane lined up with the runway, on the right glide slope, would see the ball centered in the mirror (so that’s what “call the ball” means…). If the plane was too high or low, or not lined up with the runway, the balls reflection moved appropriately in the mirror to let the pilot know which direction was off and how far. The demonstration on the Intrepid has points marked on the floor so you can see what it looks like as you line up and move around with the mirror.

After exploring below decks for a while, we enjoyed the view from the back deck, and then moved up to the flight deck to see the jets, and of course, the Space Shuttle pavilion. I enjoyed the jets, especially the venerable SR-71 Blackbird, and the iconic F-14 Tomcat, and took in quite a few shots of the aircraft and the carrier structure. Then we entered the Shuttle pavilion.

First off, it was rather warm, and humid, and dark in there. The first two are just uncomfortable, the third makes photography quite difficult, especially since that day I was packing my 24-105mm, a beautifully sharp lens, but only f/4.0 at it’s widest, so I had to push the ISO and make liberal use of flash. Despite these difficulties, I got some nice (albeit tight) shots of the Shuttle and inside of the pavilion, and a shot of me with the Shuttle in the background (Whoo!). All in all, worth the hassle, and the travel to see, and I am very excited to see the Shuttle again when the new permanent exhibit is completed.

From Intrepid Air & Space Museum

New strap: RS-Sport 2

As I mentioned above, for the RHIC and Intrepid trips, I was trying out a new strap for my camera. I found the factory Canon neck strap to be uncomfortable after extended use, especially when something hefty like my 25-105mm on the camera. A coworker recommended the Black Rapid straps to me, and specifically the RS-Sport 2, and the Internet agreed, so I ordered one. As a sling strap, it distributes the cameras weight across your shoulders and back, instead of tugging at your neck. It also mounts to the tripod screw on the body, so it is easy to disconnect if you want to for any reason.

The point where the camera connects to the strap is on a sliding buckle, and the strap has adjustable stops that you position near your should and hip, and the camera can then easily slide anywhere along that path. This means its very fast and quick to lift to shoot a photo, and then you can just lower it to your hip where it rests comfortably until you need it again. The strap feels very secure, and well made, and I trust it with the weight of my camera without hesitation.

As far as comfort goes, I find the strap makes a massive difference in carrying the camera, it makes the weight almost disappear, reduces strain significantly, and I feel safer with the camera down to the side then hanging over my chest. It is also very easy to scoot the camera up a bit and lay on your leg if you want to sit. The strap is not bulky, and while a little awkward to put on until you get used to it, is easy enough to forget you have on. It fits comfortable under the straps of my backpack, so I can wear the RS-2 and my normal daypack easily with no troubles at all. At an MSRP of $69.95, it may seem pricey, but I think it is really quite worth the cost, you’ll make up the savings in Advil once you eliminate that neck strain!

Finale

Well, here ends another round of great trips, fun adventures and a visit from my old roommates. I hope you enjoyed my stories about the tours and museums and took a look at all the photos posted. Coming up in September is my Disney vacation, and Maker Faire NYC 2012, which means more adventures, and more photos!

So, I apologize for my absence (how many blogs have this post once a year?) but while college taught me all kinds of useful engineering things, it did almost nothing to explain a 9am to 6pm work day (and how it’s nice to even pull off only those hours!), and insistent customers. It also failed to indicate what effect that was going to have on my free time!

So, what have I been up to this past (almost) year?

Photography

Well, I took a lot of pictures:

NYC May 2012	NYC December 2011	Riverhead Cardboard Boat Race 2012
Maker Faire NY 2011	Jones Beach Air Show 2012	American Airpower Museum

I’ve learned a lot of things about photography, mostly that I still know almost nothing about it! But I managed to take at least a few nice photos… such as this one:

From NYC December 2011

which is now hanging up on my wall over my computer desk at home. It’s a nice relaxing sight when I’m trying to write something witty here, or trying to solve a weird problem. It’s actually printed on aluminum (by these guys) and in a ‘floating’ frame, so it actually hangs about an inch off the wall.

I’m getting better in general at working the camera, I’ve invested in some nicer glass (that’s photographer slang for lenses, see how much I’m learning?) for the Rebel and a lot of books, and I’ve been using Meetup to find great events to watch and photograph with other area photographers. I am greatly enjoying this, and have found something that gets my creative juices flowing like engineering design, that is just as much fun and much, much easier to share with the rest of my family and friends. Anyone can appreciate an interesting photo without needing any kind of technical background to understand or enjoy it, which is making this a very new experience for me. Previously, my activities and hobbies were generally concentrated on things that didn’t translate well to people who weren’t as interested as I was.

Skydiving

I also decided to deal with a slight fear of flying and heights (it wasn’t debilitating, but it did tend to give me shifty eyes and sweaty palms) by jumping out of a plane. Is that a little crazy? It probably is, but check out the look on my face:

And, of course, some photos:

Skydiving

It started with a nervous flight up, and then some sheer terror and rethinking when we were about to jump, but then it was a blast! once we were in the fall. Needless to say, falling out of a plane has never seemed so fun before! I can’t wait for a good excuse to go again, and I don’t think I’d be nervous another time around.

If you’re wondering, I did my jump with these guys out in Calverton, NY, flying out of this airport:

View Larger Map

Travels and more to come

I’ve done some traveling, visiting Atlantic City for a long weekend vacation with my old college buddies, road trips all over Jersey for work and pleasure. My future travels include an upcoming solo trip to Disney World, I haven’t been since 2009 and I miss the place, and I’m looking forward to having the freedom to roam around the World with my camera and no one to slow me down! After that some time next year, I want to go to Hawaii and see the Mauna Kea observatory. After that, I’m thinking I really want to see Alaska!

I’ve been also putting a lot of effort in to meeting new people, as I mentioned above, I am using this Internet thingy to find other photographers to hang out with and shoot photos with, I’m also in general trying to be more socially outgoing, and I’m having a fair amount of success.

Engineering

I’ve also done a lot of engineering, but almost exclusively at work. My workbench is starting to get a bit dusty, as I find myself not really wanting to work with electronics or software much after doing it all day. This is something I knew was a risk when I decided to pursue a career in engineering. It’s hard to do something all day under pressure, then come on and do it all night for fun. At first I felt a little silly, how could I not want to do it? I love this stuff right?

Well, it turns out work will do that to you. Don’t get me wrong, I still love what I do, and I enjoy the challenges my work gives me, but when I get home, it’s like a switch flips, and I couldn’t care less until the next morning (or next Monday if it’s a Friday). This seems to be a common occurrence in my profession, as a number of my classmates I keep in touch with have experienced similar afflictions. I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing, it’s just the way life has turned out. On one hand, I worry that I’m going to lose my edges if I become too caught up in the work of it all, but on the other hand, it’s really been great do other things with my free time! On the whole, I feel considerably more balanced, I do engineering at work, and photography at home, or biking, or watch a movie, play a board game, build a model, go on trips… you get the picture?

That’s not to say I don’t do any geeky projects in my off-time, just that they’re a lot more spread out and share my time with my other pursuits. As a result, I find I have less and less to say about the technical world, and more to say about lots of other things, so I’m taking up writing again, and will hopefully be posting here with some regularity (see? more of those cliché blog promises!) about all manner of things.

Epilogue

Well, I think it’s clear, I’ve been pretty busy! I hope that suitably justifies the lack of updates here, and I hope that I can parlay my many new activities in to more content for the site.

Well, until next time… (and hopefully not next year!)

So, while learning how to use the auto-bracketing on my new camera, I decided to shoot the Koi Pond my uncle has, and then try an HDR stack. After that I played with the colors a bit, and I think it came out pretty nice, but I hate that fence in the background…. either way though, take a look:

And I promise, I’m still working on that write up for the balloon!

So, recently I took another tour at Brookhaven National Laboratory, this one was of the RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) facility at the laboratory. In a nutshell, they take gold atoms (ka-ching!) and make them zoom around in circles at 99.995% the speed of light, and then, wait for it….. they collide them!

Bet you didn’t see that coming!

The collision causes a sudden burst of massive heat, which causes the gold matter to melt down to it’s most basic components (quarks, gluons, stuff like that) and gives scientists a view of what the universe might have been like in the first few instants after the big bang. It’s really, really, really cool!

This experiment is such a big deal, it is made up of parts all over the laboratory site.

Basically, the process start at TANDEMS, middle center of the above map, where the gold atom is stripped of most of its electrons (making it an ion) and accelerated part of the way, up the stream to EBIS, where it’s accelerated further, and flung in to AGS, where the remaining electrons are knocked off and it is further accelerated, before finally getting passed up to the RHIC, where it is accelerated up to 99.995% the speed of light, I say this again because that is really fricking fast! So fast in fact, you can’t measure it in speed anymore, but in terms of how much energy the whirling particles have. Can you tell I’m impressed?

While the particle (actually, a cloud of particles) whirls around the RHIC really, really fast, another particle (cloud) whirls around it in the opposite direction. This is handled inside two pipes that run the whole length of the RHIC tunnel under ground at the laboratory. Just for reference, the RHIC tunnel is underground, but the support structures and clear path above it make the whole site not only visible, but obvious from space. Check out the Google Maps snapshot below!

View Larger Map

And under that big ring, it looks like this:

So that is the RHIC in a (slightly jumbo) nutshell.

Also, I’m still working on my write-up on the High Altitude Balloon Project, but between work and my crazy social life (for once, that’s not a joke) I haven’t been able to finish it. It is taking a while because it will be quite in-depth and photo-filled. As an olive branch to my impatient fans out there (I think I see one of you, maybe two?) I’m going to share one of the photos I am working on in preparation for this write-up. It’s not ready, and I may not even use it…. but here goes:

The photos in this post are all from my new Canon Rebel T2i camera, which I purchased recently and am still learning how to use. Expect to see more photos here though, as I really enjoy using it, and soon enough I will be at Maker Faire New York 2011 with it!

So, as you’ve seen below, my friends and I have built and launched a high altitude balloon. This was a continuation of the stalled balloon project I mentioned last year. The balloon pack was completed, and launched successfully. A few minutes in to the flight, we lost all telemetry very abruptly from the balloon, and we were not able to locate the landing zone. While this was unfortunate, the project was still overall a success in my eyes. The system we designed functioned well in all preflight tests, and the leading theory is that the solar power system was entirely too effective, creating an over-voltage condition that fried the sensor pack, the GPS or the radio transmitter module, or some combination of those components.

More details can be found at the balloon project page which I will post a link to as soon as it is complete.

The other topic, today I visited Brookhaven National Laboratory for one of their ‘Summer Sundays‘ events, this one as the title says was the tour of the National Synchrotron Light Source, also knows as the NSLS, and it’s younger brother, the NSLS-II which is still under construction. The tour involved an open house at the construction site with several exhibits, and a tour of the parts of the actual storage ring structure that is complete, plus a close up look at one of the sextupole magnets used to guide the electron beam in it’s circular journey. I was accompanied by two of my friends on this journey, Tom and Matttew, and we were quite… inquisitive. I have to tip my virtual hat to the tour guides, they were very friendly and welcoming of our questions and answered them in great depth, while being pretty good about making it understandable for us. I snapped quite a few photos of that, and while most of them are sitting in post processing, I have attached a few here to this post as a preview.

If you’ve come to my website because you located a downed weather balloon package in upstate New York, please contact me immediately at admin@mattkrass.com. the pack was launched this past Sunday and has stopped transmitting its location to us. If returned there will be a reward.

More details to follow, for now, this ambiguous overly photoshopped preview!

(I got bored and had a camera?)

Make special note of the awesome arrangement of resistors in the bottom right area.

I just added another guide I threw together tonight on Potentiometers. The guide is specifically geared towards FIRST Robotics Teams, but if there is interest I can expand on it to be more generic.

It’s available here, and as always, questions, comments, etc are welcome!