26 May 2011

An interesting photo from NASA

I'll put the description below the fold to allow your imagination more leeway...
This NASA image shows a three-millimetre diameter droplet of heptane fuel as it burns in microgravity, producing soot. When a bright, uniform backlight is placed behind the droplet and flame and recorded by a video camera, the soot appears as a dark cloud. Image processing techniques can then quantify the soot concentration at each point in the image. On the International Space Station, the Flame Extinguishing Experiment examines the combustion of such liquid fuel droplets.This colourised grey-scale image is a composite of the individual video frames of the backlit fuel droplet. The bright yellow structure in the middle is the path of the droplet, which becomes smaller as it burns. Initial soot structures (in green) tend to form near the liquid fuel. These come together into larger and larger particles which ultimately spiral out of the flame zone in long, twisting streamers.
Photo credit: AFP/NASA, via Telegraph.  (I don't understand why it has bilateral symmetry; it must be a consequence of the recording apparatus.)

6 comments:

  1. Meh. That was too easy--how could you NOT know what that photo was?

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  2. I thought it was a shrimp. Seriously.

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  3. Ahhh, I thought it was Butane..........

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  4. +1 on the mirrored. So much of what NASA feeds us is 'enhanced'. Another depressing discovery as an adult: most of the beauty of space is 'enhanced' before marketed because 1. the radiation is beyond our human eyesight. 2. pretty brings in more revenue than fact.

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  5. "I thought it was butane"...Genius!

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