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.
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.
I 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, ...
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.
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 :(
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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.
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, ...
* 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.
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 :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
There's one in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris — blew my mind!
[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_chamber
Edit: turns out people make these at home all the time. Sick!