Original poster: David Speck <Dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>When running my small coil outdoors for my Halloween "Mad Scientist" display, on breezy nights I've seen a visual display much like the results of the rotating mirror photos. The moving sheet of air results in two streamers close together, then a space, then two or three more streamers -- you can visualize the 120 Hz modulation of the streamer brightness and current just by looking at the bands of the streamers in the breeze -- a neat effect. It works best when the arc is being directed to a grounded stick, and the arc path is perpendicular to the direction of the airflow. Perhaps you could reproduce this indoors with a big box fan. Anyone up to try? Might need some sort of arrangement to make laminar airflow -- don't know if a box fan output would be too turbulent, but it might work if it were far enough away.
DaveBelow are links to some photos of my 2003 Halloween show, the best turnout I ever had.
http://davidspeckmd.org/~davids/img/wl/hal/DSCN1124.JPG http://davidspeckmd.org/~davids/img/wl/hal/DSCN1134.JPG http://davidspeckmd.org/~davids/img/wl/hal/DSCN1136.JPG http://davidspeckmd.org/~davids/img/wl/hal/DSCN1157.JPG http://davidspeckmd.org/~davids/img/wl/hal/DSCN1159.JPG http://davidspeckmd.org/~davids/img/wl/hal/DSCN1163.JPG http://davidspeckmd.org/~davids/img/wl/hal/DSCN1167.JPG http://davidspeckmd.org/~davids/img/wl/hal/DSCN1181.JPG Some day, I'll learn how to make a real web page!
Have you ever seen those LED gadgets sometimes at science museums? At first glance it looks like a vertical column of LEDs, but if you sweep your eyes horizontally, you see that there is in fact an image or text sequence modulated into the LED column. If you didn't sweep your glance, you wouldn't see the image. Same with the streak camera.