ah HA!
Finally! Figured out one of those little questions that had been nagging the back of my head, and never got anyone to answer.
When you look at test images of nuclear explosions, there were always lines of smoke to each side of the explosion. I at one point even found a graduate student on nuclear engineering at one point, and asked them, and no one could give me an answer on what the damn things were, or what caused them. So hunted around, wondered if maybe they were from lightning strikes, as nuclear blasts cause those. Except lightning doesn't leave smoke where it was.
Turns out that in military tests, they would send up rockets to form smoke-trails before the explosion so that photography could mark the position and movement of the blast front in the milliseconds after the blast, via the distortion of the smoke trails. So that's why no one could figure it out. They don't make sense with the damn explosion, because they're not a part of the fucking explosion.
Yay, now I can go to sleep.
When you look at test images of nuclear explosions, there were always lines of smoke to each side of the explosion. I at one point even found a graduate student on nuclear engineering at one point, and asked them, and no one could give me an answer on what the damn things were, or what caused them. So hunted around, wondered if maybe they were from lightning strikes, as nuclear blasts cause those. Except lightning doesn't leave smoke where it was.
Turns out that in military tests, they would send up rockets to form smoke-trails before the explosion so that photography could mark the position and movement of the blast front in the milliseconds after the blast, via the distortion of the smoke trails. So that's why no one could figure it out. They don't make sense with the damn explosion, because they're not a part of the fucking explosion.
Yay, now I can go to sleep.