Sparkly sparks

[fivemack]

A cold that has repeatedly decimated the company I work for (an easy circumstance in a nine-person company ...) has kept me mostly in bed since Friday afternoon, but I felt a little better after lunch today and went down to the Museum of Technology on Riverside (with the 170-foot chimney, it's hard to miss) for a demonstration of Tesla coils. Bumped into bugshaw there; I think her trousers are the backdrop to the brush-discharge photo.

It's there Sunday as well; traditional British well-made hobbyist engineering, actinic sparks, electrical roaring, comforting whiffs of ozone, and there's also a museum of working steam-engines, with a vast furnace whose door, to save on coke, is only ever opened for just long enough to discover that you've got the exposure on your camera wrong. The Teslathon is well-concealed, but worth asking people to find.

Comments

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

They blew the power (a little after you left I think). Did you get a shot of the big coil arcing towards the corner pillar of the building? That really gave a sense of scale.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I was never quite standing at the right angle for that, though I think the big braided spark in the middle image is heading in that direction; I wanted to concentrate on the braiding rather than on the rather uninteresting warehouse it all happened in, I thought the brush-discharge satisfied the quota of lightning-like spark-ends.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

What an incredibly cool set of photos!

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

I see my trousers and raise you your t-shirt:



I hope to put more pictures up in the gallery later.

My sparks are nowhere near as sharp as yours, alas.

[darcydodo]

Really cool pictures! That first spark looks like a bachelor's button/cornflower gone wrong. :)