VISITORS' PHOTO GALLERY - NEW!
(and still very much under construction)
Niagara Falls - Canadian Side U.S. side and from the air (in top rt quad) Cassy and Jessica under the falls! <--> Ship Rock - Crater Lake, Oregon
Doug gets the big one (10lbs) 1999 opening night Perry Baromedical hyperbaric chambers.
My brother recently installed these at Pleasant Valley Hospital in Camarillo.
Carl says the larger chambers dive to 66' and exert ~40,000 pounds of pressure on the door! Sailing on the Hawaiian Chieftain
This picture of a fire in Montana was taken on August 6, 2000, by a fire
behavior analyst from Fairbanks, Alaska by the name of John McColgan with a
Digital camera. Since he was working while he took the picture, he cannot
sell or profit from it so he should at least be recognized as the
photographer of this once in a lifetime shot!
Ensign John Gay could see the fighter plane drop from the sky heading
toward the port side of the aircraft carrier Constellation.
At 1,000 feet, the pilot drops the F/A-18C Hornet to
increase his speed to 750 mph, vapor flickering off the curved surfaces of the
plane. In the precise moment a cloud in the shape of a farm-fresh egg
forms around the Hornet 200 yards from the carrier, its engines rippling
the Pacific Ocean just 75 feet below, Gay hears an explosion and snaps his
camera shutter once. "I clicked the same time I heard the boom, and I
knew I had it", Gay said.
What he had was a technically meticulous depiction of
the sound barrier being broken July 7, 1999, somewhere on the Pacific
between Hawaii and Japan.
At sea level a plane must exceed 741 mph to break the
sound barrier, or the speed at which sound travels. The change in pressure as
the plane outruns all of the pressure and sound waves in front of it is
heard on the ground as an explosion or sonic boom.
The pressure change condenses the water in the air as
the jet passes these waves. Altitude, wind speed, humidity, the shape and
trajectory of the plane -- all of these affect the breaking of this
barrier. The slightest drag or atmospheric pull on the plane shatters the vapor
oval like fireworks as the plane passes through, he said
everything on July 7 was perfect.
You see this vapor flicker around the plane that gets
bigger and bigger. You get this loud boom, and it's instantaneous. The
vapor cloud is there, and then it's not there. It's the coolest thing you have
ever seen.
A naval veteran of 12 years, Gay, 38, manages a crew of
eight assigned to take intelligence photographs from the high-tech belly
of an F-14 Tomcat, the fastest fighter in the U.S. Navy.
In July, Gay had been part of a Joint Task Force Exercise as the
Constellation made its way to Japan.
Gay selected his Nikon 90S, one of the five 35mm
cameras he owns. He set his 80-300mm zoom lens on 300mm, set his shutter speed
at 1/1000 of a second with an aperture setting of F5.6.
"I put it on full manual, focus and exposure", Gay said.
"I tell young photographers who are into automatic everything, you
aren't going to get that shot on auto. The plane is too fast. The camera
can't keep up."
Click on this picture to see the entire globe at night (386KB JPG) on the NASA web-site!
RAWHIDE, NEVADA
Exploring the gold mines with my Navy buddies!
