Friday, December 10, 2004

Weekly Email 12-10-04


Talk about all this water falling from the skies huh?
Yesterday I went dow to see the National Geographic Society - they are a large customer of ours. I went down to the basement of their sprawling building complex and went to see the machine shop for underwater devices. This group of guys basically make anything needed for underwater sea exploration and photo capture.

I "highlighted" 2 devices they built (from scratch) - the one on the left has a large glass ball which provides about 56lbs of buoyancy
- it is housed now to prevent scratches in the yellow cover. This perfect sphere can withstand all sea pressures since it is perfect, and the pressure cannot crush it due to it's shape and some sort of physics you can look up. They basically dangle this from a ship to wicked depths and wait for stuff to swim by or watch the sea floor action. The black boxes are cameras and batteries, with lights on both sides.

The other more mobile device has a Fujifilm S2 connected to a custom built mini computer that is then remotely controlled from the surface - UP TO 6,000 feet. Now that's a lot of cable! They had to calculate the buoyancy of every pipe and it's air content and of course all the battery tubes and camera housings. Neat huh?

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A Quick Look at the 1972 Hasselblad 500C/M

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