Re: Clever way to make a gamma ray telescope

Jan 05, 2024 Last reply: 2 years ago 1 Replies


Pancake stack of films on a balloon most accurate gamma-ray telescope


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clever way to make gamma ray pictures.

That is actually quite clever, ingenious and high resolution.


I was once involved in another way to get what at the time were cutting edge high energy satellite images by rotating a set of scintillation counters with a second set in front creating a quadratic residue mask. It imaged the sky in 1D at much better than anything prior and the spinning allowed a 2D image. The resolution was pretty poxy though.


Shadow mask tricks were popular back then since nobody had been able to focus such energetic radiation well enough. Once they could it was quickly outclassed by glancing incidence optics with seriously high resolution in the X-ray band.

To my knowledge, using stacks of film to record particle tracks is as old as knowledge of radioactivity itself. However, moving a few layers, clockwork fashion, for recording the time of the tracks is a cute trick.

Moreover, they used this to correct for the swaying motion of their balloon-borne detector so they could pinpoint the origin of the gammas! Now that's worthy of admiration! Hats off!

Jeroen Belleman

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