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"Neat" Pictures


Dr. Anomaly

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Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

Very strange diffraction pattern on the streetlights.
Hmm, what do you find odd about them?

 

Photography blather spoilered

The diffraction effects Cancer posted about are the rays coming off the lights. They happen when the aperture (the hole that lets light into the camera) is kept very tiny. Keeping the aperture tiny is a good technique for catching lightning, since they let you leave the aperture open for a good long while, perhaps even several seconds. So you just put the camera on a tripod and have the camera continuosly take pictures. Then you have good odds that any given shot will have lightning in it. Besides, lightning is so bright, even a tight aperture lets in plenty of light

 

The other possible trick (not shown, I think) is to rig a "slave" to trigger the shutter on the camera. A slave is normally a triggering mechanism for a flash. A slave 'sees' a flash go off somewhere else and triggers whatever flash it's attached to, so normally it's a good way to coordinate multiple flashes.

 

 

Anyway, the diffraction looks similar to other ones I've seen. What stands out to you?

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Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

Nothing to see here (unless you want to sink into optics), move along.

 

 

There's a large number of diffraction spikes, and they aren't equal in magnitude. They look to be bilaterally symmetric, but not azimuthally symmetric. I don't have the Fourier transform in my head to figure out what the shape of the blockage in the aperture plane is, which is unusual.

 

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Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

The same reason Texas is generally thought of as being a desert.

 

Then again, at least half the area of Oregon is pretty much desert. Hence the neverending controversy about who gets how much of the diminishing water supply in the basin of the Klamath River in the eastern part of the state. People there are used to using it to irrigate fields in land that would be useless for agriculture otherwise, never mind the effect on fish and wildlife (to which many of the farmers are openly hostile).

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Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

Yeah... all the parts I've been through are desert... but there's whole coastal region I've never visited.

 

Sometimes it's hard to remember some states are more than one environmental zone.

 

Not only states.

 

Still people around whose knowledge of Australia is limited to scenes from Crocodile Dundee. I daresay we are all guilty of that sort of thing to some extent.

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Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

Yeah... all the parts I've been through are desert... but there's whole coastal region I've never visited.

 

Sometimes it's hard to remember some states are more than one environmental zone.

 

Agreed. Texas is quite arid in its western regions, very much "plains state" in its central region, and heavily forested in its eastern region. At least three different biomes.

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