Ben Holcomb
EF5
As some of you may know, the "Big Kahuna" camera landed at the University of Oklahoma after Tim's passing in 2013. It was given to one of the biggest lightning researchers in the country - Dan Peterson. Dan has moved on from OU, accepting a job in the Washington D.C. area, so the camera was given as a project to myself and Shawn Riley, the other IT guy for the School of Meteorology.
I've finally had a chance to get a run down of the camera and do a little playing with it today, and wanted to update the Stormtrack community about it, since many are unaware of the challenges.
My first impressions are that it's a somewhat complex system. The only moving part is the mirror inside, which spins up to 1000 RPS with gas whether it be compressed helium, nitrogen or just a simplistic air compressor. There's challenges with each type of gas, cost being a big factor for nitrogen and helium. With that said, the mirror can only spin for 30 seconds to a minute at those high RPM's before becoming too hot since it is a mechanical mirror that uses bearings.
The 10MP camera sensors are mounted around the outside, 82 of them in all. There is a frequency counter that fires each sensor in a series as the mirror spins in the camera. Each of these sensors are connected with USB 2.0, so it is somewhat slow to download images off, taking 20-25 minutes to download images.
The Camera is more like a telescope with such a long focal length as well. The government originally used the camera to take photos of the atomic explosions, so they would have the camera a long distance away and focus the lens on a fixed position before running it (it was film). Focus seems to be a big problem, and may not actually be solved easily. There's an extra camera mounted to one of the spots instead of a sensor because we theorize Tim was trying to use it to get focus correct. It's a cheap photo sensor that was probably hooked up in some sort of fashion.
The lenses for each spot are also f stop 26. This seems like it may be a problem as well for us, as even the brightest lightning strike may be hard to capture with such a high f stop, especially at very short exposures (microseconds)
The weight makes moving the camera easily quite prohibitive, so getting a lightning strike here in Norman from the NWC seems like the best bet. Unfortunately there's very small windows to do so where strikes are close enough to capture with the camera.
This project will definitely not move very fast, but I will update this thread if I have any success in getting the camera working. There's a lot of obstacles, but it would be nice to capture Tim's dream.
I've finally had a chance to get a run down of the camera and do a little playing with it today, and wanted to update the Stormtrack community about it, since many are unaware of the challenges.
My first impressions are that it's a somewhat complex system. The only moving part is the mirror inside, which spins up to 1000 RPS with gas whether it be compressed helium, nitrogen or just a simplistic air compressor. There's challenges with each type of gas, cost being a big factor for nitrogen and helium. With that said, the mirror can only spin for 30 seconds to a minute at those high RPM's before becoming too hot since it is a mechanical mirror that uses bearings.
The 10MP camera sensors are mounted around the outside, 82 of them in all. There is a frequency counter that fires each sensor in a series as the mirror spins in the camera. Each of these sensors are connected with USB 2.0, so it is somewhat slow to download images off, taking 20-25 minutes to download images.
The Camera is more like a telescope with such a long focal length as well. The government originally used the camera to take photos of the atomic explosions, so they would have the camera a long distance away and focus the lens on a fixed position before running it (it was film). Focus seems to be a big problem, and may not actually be solved easily. There's an extra camera mounted to one of the spots instead of a sensor because we theorize Tim was trying to use it to get focus correct. It's a cheap photo sensor that was probably hooked up in some sort of fashion.
The lenses for each spot are also f stop 26. This seems like it may be a problem as well for us, as even the brightest lightning strike may be hard to capture with such a high f stop, especially at very short exposures (microseconds)
The weight makes moving the camera easily quite prohibitive, so getting a lightning strike here in Norman from the NWC seems like the best bet. Unfortunately there's very small windows to do so where strikes are close enough to capture with the camera.
This project will definitely not move very fast, but I will update this thread if I have any success in getting the camera working. There's a lot of obstacles, but it would be nice to capture Tim's dream.
