Archived - Zambelli fusion star.

[Richard Hull]

Attached is an old photo of Joe Zambelli's star I took on my visit to his place a couple of years ago.

His star is tiny as well. You will notice his grid stalk moves up from the 10 o'clock position.

The salient point is that the star is always small in a clean machine. My stars were small too, but all of my images were what I call "double interpreted" or pictures of pictures. This chases the gamma of the image upwards and blooming is introduced. I always used a video camera to view the image and displayed on a tv monitor. I then shot an image off the screen using my digital camera. Secondly, my fusor device is the only one I have ever seen where you are looking down the axis of the mounting stalk. I did this by design so that the nasty old stalk is not part of the image and the inner grid appears to be floating in space.

This mounting was great, but the UV radiation from the poissor, which is intense and of short wavelegth, causes the pink dyed alumina insulator face, (TIG nozzle sleeve), encasing the stalk to fluoresce rather brilliantly. As this sleeve is on the optical axis of the poissor, the combination of the stalk insulator face glow and the poissor being gamma enhanced by the manner of my image capture causes my center to look a bit larger and much more brilliant than it would be optically to the eye. A direct recording camera poked at the viewport as in the case of the Zambelli image attached or Mike Amann's fine images recently posted here would also record a small poissor.

I will follow this posting with another one of my image of fusor III at full power and nearly 150,000 neuts/second. notice the apparent huge center glow of great intensity. This is a artifact of the above stated condition.

Again, the port is a torrent of nasty x-rays and I will not expose my $700.00 Sony Mavica's multi mega pixel CCD to such an electronic barrage. Instead I use a $40.00 B&W CCD based micro board, security camera to view my poissor. I would recommend others follow suit. Never look into a port when any fusor is operating over 10kv. (unless you feel a need for cataracts).

So stars are stars and in reality they are all small and beautifull regardless of the recorded or printed image appearance.

To the naked, x-ray blasted eye, the fusion star is a tiny, low contrast, rather un-impressive pink to red pink fuzzy dot and the star beams or "radials" rival it and often out shine it in beauty. Most any photographic effort will improve the contrast, pump up the gamma and make it look a bit better than in reality. To the eye, my central star looks like a bullseye target with the tiny central poissor and a nice ring around it due to the glowing cylindrical insulator face. These merge and are gamma enhanced in the video images.

Richard Hull