We met up today in order to get some much needed experiments in, We met at 10am at the St Mary's building of TVU in our newly appointed room in the basement.
We all brought along various equipment in the hope that we would get better results that our last experiments. Hadjar had also placed an order for a parabolic mirror from the states that we saw for the first time.
The mirror was not a mirror it turned out see had ordered a plastic concave mirror with a reflective surface, i'm not so sure our results will now be as good as we would like them to have been with a real piece of glass with a focal length.
We continued on with our experiments by taking apart the overhead projector and repositioning the parts where they were better suited for our experiment.
We set up the equipment according to the Schilren photography technique and set out to try and get some sort of results.
We fiddled with the overhead projector, blocked the light into cone shapes and also tried to narrow the be
an by covering the bulb with foil and poked a very small hole it to allow the light to shine through.
We moved the angle of the mirror around which we had clamped in place using a work clamp and photography clamps, This achieved a better angle for the light to be shone into.
The reflection back from the mirror we caught on a piece of white card as the strength of the light source we used was not strong enough to give us a large clear refection.
We managed again to see the effects of this technique, but it was small and not that clear, but an improvement on the last experiment.
We changed the light source back to using the LED pocket laser torch and are results were better than with the overhead projector.
We have decided to call it for the day as we had exhausted our resources and need to research further on the possibilities of using a more powerful LED Laser torch.
We did have one thought about using a torch, how would we power it? as replacing the batteries would not be cost effective.
We will be meeting again on Wednesday the 8th of December to experiment further, hopefully with a greater powered light source.
