Day 1

05/02/07

            Today we did some trial shots using various amounts of ethanol.  We wanted to figure out how much ethanol was needed to be able to get a good shot but, at the same time, not waste it.  We also tried positioning the sound trigger in different locations to see where the best placement for it was to get the best picture of the cork.  We had one minor problem today with the cork hitting the ceiling tiles, so we need to pick up a Plexiglas shield to protect them and we need some more ethanol.

Day 2

05/03/07

            Today we obtained some more ethanol and the Plexiglas shield for the ceiling.  We then set forth to set up our camera and worked on getting the correct exposure, as well as continued working on getting the right placement for the sound trigger.  From our combined efforts of yesterday and today, we’ve determined that we can use about 0.8mL of ethanol for each explosion to work and not have a lot of ethanol left over in the bottle.   The main problem that we had today was that the flash kept going off twice during every explosion, once when the cork flew off the bottle and again when it hit the ceiling.  We are going to try to solve this by using the reset delay feature on our flash delay unit.  We are going to need, however, the chord that connects the sound trigger to the delay unit, before this can be tried.

Day 3

05/04/07

            Today we started out with problems; the sound trigger would not make the flash go off in time for us to get a picture of the cork in flight.  We decided to switch to a photogate and, after getting it set up, it worked on the first try.  We got a picture of the cork at about the 10cm mark, even though the meter stick wasn’t in a position to be able to make accurate measurements.  We now have decided to incorporate a delay feature into our setup, so that we can try to get a picture the cork at different places against the meter stick.  We continued to have problems today, though, with the induction coil setting off our flash.  We tried to fix this by moving the coil away from the chords of the flash, but it still set off the flash.  We have not yet figured out a complete solution for this problem.  For the next photo shoot, though, we need to get a more stable photogate, instead of the make-shift laser photogate that we currently have.

Day 4

05/09/07

            We weren’t able to accomplish much today.  We solved our flash problem by changing out the high voltage coil with a grill starter.  Now the flash doesn’t go off every time we want to spark to jump across the screws.  After this problem was solved, however, we encountered another problem with the flash.  For some reason, the flash isn’t as bright as it used to be or something is happening where the camera isn’t picking up as much light as it used to.  We ran out of time to work on it today, but we are going to try and figure it out tomorrow.

Day 5

05/10/07

            Today the flash is magically working better; we aren’t sure why it messed up yesterday.  We decided to go ahead and set up another flash so we can start trying to get a double exposure.  This took some time, but we had a little time left to test to make sure it worked.  We first tried the double exposure by dropping a film canister through the photogate and it worked beautifully.  We then tried getting a double exposure with the cork explosion, but we were not successful.  We think the problem is that the 2^nd cork from the double exposure doesn’t show up in the picture frame, so we are going to try and get a 28mm lens to put on the camera for tomorrow, instead of using the 55mm lens.

Day 6

05/11/07

            Today we continued trying to get the cork in a double exposure shot.  We switched out the lens and we changed the capacitor in our time delay unit.  We were able to obtain a couple of pictures of the cork; at least one was a double exposure.  We then decided that we needed to get some pictures of our setup, so we took those using Jeff’s Canon PowerShot A610 camera.  We also took a lights-on video of the explosion with his camera.  Once we got done shooting with his camera, we went back to try to solve our problems that we had today.  The flash doesn’t go off every time we have an explosion.  We think this may be due to the bottle moving right before the cork releases to go through the photogate; therefore, the cork doesn’t go through the photogate.  We tried to fix this using a circular attachment to the ring stand, but it still didn’t work all the time.  We are going to try to figure this out during our next photo shoot.

Day 7

05/17/07

            Today we began by setting up another delay unit.  We think this will help us get the double exposures we are looking for; with the cork at a descent height above the bottle and when it is higher than the photogate.  Before we tested this, however, we decided to calculate the delay that we had on the flash.  We did this by using the fan and stroboscope method.  We used the stroboscope to measure the frequency of the fan, and then took a picture of the spinning fan with the 2 flashes going off.  We then looked at the picture, determined the size of the angle and used an equation to determine the time between flashes.  This time was determined to be .030998 seconds.  We then decided to try to get some more double exposures of the cork.  We were able to get one double exposure of the cork, but the flash was still messing up.  We tried changing the sensitivity of the photogate and we changed out the ring stand attachment for a roll of tape that the bottle is currently sitting in, but the flash was still not working properly.

Day 8

05/18/07

            Today we took a break from still photos and used a high speed video camera.  We took several videos of the cork explosion and one video of the glow of the bottle when the lights were turned out.  This was a nice relief from dealing with the flash problems we have been having and was probably the first day we haven’t had any significant problems.  For the next photo shoot, though we will need another 9 volt battery and a cable that connects the delay unit to the flash, because ours got taken to be used by another group’s experiment.