Random Thread #1

[flying fish]

So here's a random idea: Phosphorescent (glow in the dark) fireworks! You're break charge would only need to irradiate (not ignight) the stars...which could consist of something really simple and harmless - like KIX cerial dipped in a Strontium Aluminate suspension. They would probably be faint next to conventional stars, but I bet they would still be visible and might even produce a neat effect.

 

The biggest problem I see is that your excitation source (likely flash powder) might "blind" the audience so they will not be able to see the more faint glow effect.

 

Well, more than likely a useless idea...but anyway I'm feeling random today.

Edited February 4, 2009 by flying fish

[Mumbles]

I often day dreamed about that. I pictured something a bit different. Smoke shells with a fluorescent dye. One could either irradiate them, and use a wasp and drying box to do it, so the stuff is still glowing. The other thing I was thinking about was some sort of UV emitter on a parachute, or mixed in with the stars. Best case scenario, the burning "smoke" pellets would give enough UV to light it up.

 

I call it a ghost chrysanthemum. It'd probably have to be exceptionally dark to work.

 

If anyone ever makes it work, I get at least 20% of the credit.

[hst45]

So here's a random idea: Phosphorescent (glow in the dark) fireworks! You're break charge would only need to irradiate (not ignight) the stars...which could consist of something really simple and harmless - like KIX cerial dipped in a Strontium Aluminate suspension. They would probably be faint next to conventional stars, but I bet they would still be visible and might even produce a neat effect.

 

The biggest problem I see is that your excitation source (likely flash powder) might "blind" the audience so they will not be able to see the more faint glow effect.

 

Well, more than likely a useless idea...but anyway I'm feeling random today.

The ideal, if improbable, solution might be to develop a break-charge compound that gives off energy outside the spectrum of visible light, AND within the wavelength that would energize the phosphorescent "stars" or cloud. What an amazing display that might be. The mortar shoots, the invisible shell rises, the report of the break is heard, and an ethereal greenish cloud suddenly expands across the sky. That seems as close as one could come to homemade northern lights.

[flying fish]

I agree. The problem is that the easiest and most intense source is probably going to be incandescence-based, which I believe ALWAYS overlaps the visible spectrum above a certain temperature (and below which you won't get visible luminescence...or probably luminescence at all for that matter). I do wonder if there is some exotic spontaneous chemical reaction that exclusively produces light shorter than .4 um...

 

...Well I know there is. UV lightbulbs and tubes! The question is how do you get that into a firework-able (solid, and "igniteable") form.

Edited February 5, 2009 by flying fish

[Richtee]

The ideal, if improbable, solution might be to develop a break-charge compound that gives off energy outside the spectrum of visible light, AND within the wavelength that would energize the phosphorescent "stars" or cloud. What an amazing display that might be. The mortar shoots, the invisible shell rises, the report of the break is heard, and an ethereal greenish cloud suddenly expands across the sky. That seems as close as one could come to homemade northern lights.

 

Cool... Of course ground laser effects could do a playthru a smoke cloud as well..but $$$.

 

What's the stuff they use to show infrared remote signals..on that little card?

[flying fish]

^^^ You can get "blue ray" violet diode lasers on ebay pretty cheap these days.

 

Also, I found this about the indicator cards: http://www.bromba.com/indicard/iriga02e.htm

 

Very interesting. One method uses "chargeable" cards which release previously stored energy when exposed to IR. Other methods are non-linear (two-photon...)

 

Of course, the reason why this is "special" is because normally materials only emit luminescence photons that are BELOW the energy of excitation photons. And Visible is higher energy than IR.

[WarezWally]

Nitric acid AR 69-72% (1.42) 500ml $33.50

Sodium (metal) 100gm $28.80

Phosphorous Red 100gm $40

Nitric acid LR 69-72% (1.41-1.42) 500ml $32

Iodine resublimed AR 100gm $42

 

A seller recently imported a small sample of chems from India, the shipment has recently arrived and I'm hoping I am the one who emailed first requesting the above

 

Red P and Iodine were too good to turn down, couldnt say no to metallic sodium either

[BigBang]

Also, I found this about the indicator cards: http://www.bromba.com/indicard/iriga02e.htm

 

Very interesting. One method uses "chargeable" cards which release previously stored energy when exposed to IR. Other methods are non-linear (two-photon...)

 

Of course, the reason why this is "special" is because normally materials only emit luminescence photons that are BELOW the energy of excitation photons. And Visible is higher energy than IR.

 

 

I've had to use them for IR LEDs in the lab. The light is pretty faint. I would imagine you'd have a hard time seeing it a few hundred feet up.

 

As for the glow powder, you could use a clear shell casing and have it charge in the mortar before firing. I'm thinking christmas ornaments from a craft store. The only problem I can see is it might be too dim to see in a suburban area. You'd have to be waaay out in the boonies.

 

Does anyone have a source for cheap glow powder? Like, really really cheap?

[flying fish]

Great idea with the clear shell casings! As long as they are transparent to the 405nm LEDs, you could stick a small 405 LED flashlight down the tube to excite the glow stars before launch. Keep in mind that the brightest emmisions occur for the first couple seconds after excitation...so one potential problem with this idea is that the brightest emmision time frame is "wasted" by the fact that it takes a couple seconds to get in the air. It might also make a neat tracer effect going up though.

 

And glow in the dark powder - How much and how cheap?

 

I'm getting a small (1/2 oz) sample for some small scale experiments for about 3.50 shipped. I found it on ebay:

 

http://cgi.ebay.com/Glow-In-The-Dark-Green...A1%7C240%3A1318

 

Just do a search on ebay, or a search engine, for glow in the dark powder.

Edited February 6, 2009 by flying fish

[BigBang]

I really wouldn't know how much. I was thinking just making a big ole powder cloud, might be cool to have a big glowing cloud. Or, if the stuff could be dispersed from something like a star as it flies it's path. Now that would be like what mumbles was describing.

I think a cloud would be the easiest/most visible...

[flying fish]

I agree, a cloud would be neat. You might have to find a way of exciting the bulk powder instead of just the stuff nearest the outside. Like spreading it out under a blacklight and then dumping it down the tube!

[Aimlesspayload]

Best glow in the dark powder/paint I've ever seen. United nuclear is always so expensive though....gotta find out where they buy it from. Maybe even just painting the shell would look interesting.

 

http://unitednuclear.com/glow.htm

[tentacles]

Screw UN, these guys (http://glowinc.com/) have the best glow powders I've come across. The regular "Ultra" product is incredibly bright, and it really does glow 24 hours.

[WarezWally]

Just purchased 100g of mercury and 100g of iodine, would have go the other stuff I posted above but I was to slow

 

Couldn't say no, its not like things like mercury and iodine pop up every day.

[asilentbob]

https://sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=1485

 

"PASSENGERS on board cruise liners are sometimes startled by an eerie phosphorescent glow emitted by seawater flush lavatories. The explanation lies in luminous bacteria, which require oxygen for their light-generating reactions."

 

Perhaps related... Sorta. Ish. It would have to be really dark... and the delivery would be tricky. Perhaps some kind of pneumatic star mine would be better than a shell... I really don't know how quick the phosphorescense would start up though and if it would increase significantly (due to oxygen) as they fly through the air... As for stars i would think some kind of cereal rolled with a colony just prior to launch perhaps.

 

Another idea is using the mix in traditional glow sticks... but tweaked so as to give max light for a much shorter duration... Minutes instead of hours or something.

 

I haven't really had time to post here lately... Classes are already starting to kick my ass... And I'm about to wipe my laptop and start fresh again... I would like to set up 3 or 4 operating systems on my laptop... but thus far when I try to set up even a dual boot setup on another computer i mess it up somehow... Thinking Backtrack3, WinXP, Vista (a HEAVILY tweaked version), and ultimate linux a ubuntu based IIRC distro with ALOT of eye candy. Oh, and Quantian a science geared linux distro would be nice too... I know they could all fit fine within 200GB on separate partitions as the linux distros really don't need much space... BUT getting them to all play nice on a single bootloader isn't working well for me :/. I might have posted something like this before... I really can't remember. ... I recently looked into VMware player running on Windows, and it works nicely... BUT I MUST have PCMCIA recognized in Backtrack3... which wont work with VMware player... AND I'm going to be using XP and Vista most of the time... so having them as virtual machines under one of the linux distros doesn't make sense. If only every OS installation disk had an option to NOT write over the MBR... but edit it to add the new OS to the list...

[WarezWally]

I'll give you a bit of advice I discovered;

 

Stay away from tweaked versions of Windows, drivers, hardware and software never play nice when numerous things have been tacked on and numerous things have been cut out. Same goes for stock distros packed with crap.

 

Backtrack3 is one sweet piece of kit, have that on your lappy and you will never go without a tool for getting access to something abroad

[tentacles]

Wally: Mercury is *easy* to get. Go collect mercury switches from thermostats or smaller switches from cars. I've got a jar with like a kilo of the stuff in it sitting here. No idea what I'd ever do with it, but it makes a neat sound when you shake it. That's totally worth keeping it around. ;P

 

I put a tweaked XP on my wife's new PC, and it runs *great*, but I grabbed this from my favorite (private) torrent site, and have had very good luck with their releases and such. It came with some lame vista skin but I quickly removed that BS, and it's very light with a lot of the default BS turned off already, and good tweaks and such enabled/configured.

[WarezWally]

I've got a few mercury switches but its a major pain in the ass to harvest the small (2g?) of mercury inside, crushing glass switches in a big plastic bucket with a sheet of plastic is just not worth it.

[Yankie]

Is there actually any use for mercury? Or is it just the novelty factor? Tentacles. what type of sound DOES it make when you shake a jar full of it?

[WarezWally]

Your HE qualified, you should know

 

I'm not sure about the sound but the sheer weight is amazing

[WarezWally]

Just finished my 3rd 'Australian' longneck of Coopers Pale Ale

 

Excellent

[flying fish]

https://sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=1485

 

"PASSENGERS on board cruise liners are sometimes startled by an eerie phosphorescent glow emitted by seawater flush lavatories. The explanation lies in luminous bacteria, which require oxygen for their light-generating reactions."

 

Perhaps related... Sorta. Ish. It would have to be really dark... and the delivery would be tricky. Perhaps some kind of pneumatic star mine would be better than a shell... I really don't know how quick the phosphorescense would start up though and if it would increase significantly (due to oxygen) as they fly through the air... As for stars i would think some kind of cereal rolled with a colony just prior to launch perhaps.

 

Another idea is using the mix in traditional glow sticks... but tweaked so as to give max light for a much shorter duration... Minutes instead of hours or something.

 

It would be cool to have glowing bacteria splattered all over the place after the fireworks show! Well, assuming they weren't pathogenic anyway. Plus biology really is yet another science that needs to be somehow incorporated into fireworks...

 

Technically what you have described is chemiluminescence, not phosphorescence (since phosphorescence refers to glowing things that were excited by light, and in this case it was a chemical reaction). I do also like the glow stick idea. Though I'm not sure how environmentally friendly that would be...

[asilentbob]

Thanks, yeah BT3 is interesting... I have it on a 1GB USB drive... It doesn't come with an installer though BT3b did... So I had to google a bit to find an installer... then boot up in BT3 off the USB drive and use wget to download it... BUT I finally got it to install on an old laptop... Then I tryed putting XP on another partition... and it worked... but now i can't get back into backtrack :/... I tryed using acronis OS selector... parts of it are very nice... but parts of it just don't seem to work for me... so meh. I'll probably delete/re-format partitions and re-do it all later and use LILO or GRUB instead.

 

Having now read a bit more... I realize that the accepted general way of putting multiple operating systems on a computer is to generally put XP or vista on first, THEN linux distros and use LILO or GRUB. But meh. Still learning. It surprises me that I have spent so much time on this... much more time than I generally have to spend to learn something. Guess thats what I get growing up under the MS umbrella.

 

Yeah I have a few strange sounding vista distros to test out... Haven't looked for XP ones as I have a nice plain one that works fine. I'm thinking that I'll install on an un-used laptop and mess around with them for a bit before deciding to install on this laptop. Either way I'll probably go in and modify the services settings on XP and vista to cut down on pointless memory usage whenever I do get them installed... In addition to completely removing some things that I'll never use.

 

Oh. And I need to find a roughly 8" OD x 1/2" shaft x 1/2" width v belt pulley for gearing down my star roller. The 6" one thats on there is wayyyyy too fast. Unfortunately my Ace hardware only carries 6" OD ones... And I could only find 1 on ebay and it is way over priced though the right kind. :[

[Miech]

GRUB is the way to go when making a multiboot. Easy to get up running, easy to configure and gets anything to work without much trouble. The next thing to learn is how to tweak the menu.lst file, it can actually do so much more than you would think of (including completely crashing your computer ).

 

For 'glow in the dark' stars, I'd think of two possibilities of which one is not recommended though. The easiest way to go would be to paint some random round objects with paint containing radon and zinc sulfide. That will keep on glowing for decades, but it is radioactive --> a no-go. The other more realistic possibility would be to look for a paint that glows on heating. I know such compounds exist, and the break charge would be hot enough to get it glowing. To get strong emission you either need to find exactly the right compound, or find an UV emitting compound and mix it with something that emits from UV (fluorescein, rhodamine B and such).

 

EDIT: Mumbles' idea might not even be that crazy. The Japanese actually have shells pretty much like that, with ordinary smoke stars and a flare on a parachute. The UV flare could be replaced by (invisible) UV emitting power LED's and a large capacitor, which is relatively small and lightweight (and rechargable too). Combine that with a modified smoke star and you are almost there. You would certainly win some competitions if you'd succeed making such a device .

Edited February 7, 2009 by Miech

[andyboy]

I've got a few mercury switches but its a major pain in the ass to harvest the small (2g?) of mercury inside, crushing glass switches in a big plastic bucket with a sheet of plastic is just not worth it.

 

It's not that bad, break it with your hands and collect it like I do: (Joke).