December 2011 Archives

and what a beautiful day it was. With temperatures in the mid 70s I took a hike up A-mountain and shot this view of Tempe.
And look what else I found...

Merry Christmas!

I had an old webcam sitting around and got a cheap smoke detector for a couple of bucks to get the small piece of Americium-241 which is used as the ionizing agent.

The Am-241 is mainly an alpha and gamma emitter with alpha particles easily blocked.
So I used the CMOS sensor of the disassembled webcam to check for decay.
Placing the little piece of Am-241 on the CMOS covers pretty much all the active region of the sensor. The glass protective piece will block the alpha particles but the gammas make it through and are shown as bright flashes in the recording (YouTube). Pretty cool!

After all the science at the MRS Fall meeting it was a nice change of pace to have a look at some art. The Museum of Fine Arts is just about one mile from Copley Place, perfect for a little walk.