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Blacker Than Black
An anonymous reader writes "British scientists at the National Physical Laboratory in London have invented the darkest material on Earth. 'It could revolutionise optical instruments because it reflects 10 to 20 times less light than the black paint currently used to reduce unwanted reflections. The key to the nickel and phosphorous coating's blackness is that its surface is pitted with microscopic craters.' Wonder how effective it would be as a solar heating surface ?"
What's blacker than black... ...a new nickel and phosphorous coating with microscopi...
You know? The joke just isn't as funny this way.
Wonder how effective it would be as a solar heating surface ?
That probably depends on the specific heat of the material.
I myself wonder how physically resilient this material is, what it's impedance is, and whether it isn't extremely similar the blackbird surface material.
I would say that the solar surface is hot enough as it is!
Enig? Det alt for hot det smor!
Goths just got scarier. "Black as night, faster than a shadow" -Judas Priest- "Hell Bent For Leather"
"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."
If it reflected one times less that'd mean it was reflecting nothing at all, so what happens when it reflects 10 times less?
Need I say more?
A)bort, R)etry or S)elf-destruct?
My high school physics teacher had a piece of "black," though not as black as this. He said he'd put it against walls and students sitting at the other end of the room would think there was a hole, he said. By the time I saw it, it was old and had gotten too dusty to be very impressive.
Whale
Why don't they name materials better today? What is interesting in the name "Super-black"? Nothing!
I suggest we call it Darkonium or something...
None.
None more black.
"It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black."
NIGEL: I think he's right, there is something about this, that's that's so black, it's like; "How much more black could this be?" and the answer is: "None, none... more black."
I wouldn't mind coating the interior of my Hasselblad with that :)
-Mark
OK, now we know what fuligin is made of.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...for us gothics ! Where can I buy clothes and make-up with this material ?
Nigel Fox, who heads the optics group at NPL, said: "When you look at the black, it is an incredibly beautiful surface. It's like black velvet."
Who'll be the first schmuck to paint Jesus or Elvis onto this surface?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The light that is neither transmitted nor reflected is absorbed. If it is totally opaque too it has to be also a good solar heating surface. That said, one might be a very good absorber at particular wavelengths, but transparent or reflective at others. The cavities should act as a blackbody and operate at a wide range of frequencies though.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Is this a material that Ford and Zaphod will marvel at as they cruise space parks looking for a ship to steal and will Marvin be riding a ship made of one into the sun.
Rest In Peace Mr. Adams
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
Hotblack wants to upgrade his spaceship with some new buttons.
Rob.
Trent Lott is quoted as apologizing to this new material.
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
so I know this material has been here on earth since the "Dawn of Man."
I would love to see this used to coat the vanes that support the secondary mirrors of reflector type telescopes. Diffraction spikes (the little spikes on relatively bright stars) are really the reflection of light on these little supports. If you are into photographing nebulae, having a bright star in view can be a real photo killer.
From the lame Ananova article:
I thought that black velvet was 60% Guinness and 40% Champagne...
Might make a cool screen too.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Just turn out the lights, drink a few dozen beers, or even just close their eyes?
The book 'The Hubble Wars' mentions a coating called 'Martin Black' developed by Lockheed-Martin for use in spy satellites - I wonder how this stuff compares. I found some info Here : The 'Martin Black' is not a paint at all, but a specially etched aluminum surface that acts like an anechoic chamber on a microscopic scale. The surface looks like an array of very steep pyramids a few wavelengths of light apart. It's extremely fragile & expensive to produce, but was never a classified process. Mostly used in aerospace optical hardware such as star trackers & imaging systems that have to work in direct sunlight. Ball Aerospace has a version of this process. It's considered to be a 'proprietary' process, ie they won't tell you how it's done for commercial reasons.
light absorbtion prop-PER-ties!
:)
An' I'm Supa-Black! UNGH!
Hawt!
ala SuperBad
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
Can we have a picture of this color please?
As others have said here, the possibility of
this stuff being used in espionage and the like
are tremendous. Depending on the applicability,
all kinds of stealth stuff could come out of this.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
There's a little more detail and a few pictures at http://www.npl.co.uk/optical_radiation/superblack. html
no llamas were harmed in the making of this sig
Well... in physics, the sun is often used as an example of a "black body", so one may even say it's black enough as it is ;-)
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
Scientists estimate this will be the blackest material ever manufactured, until they perfect the technique of mass-producing Hillary Rosen's soul.
Don't Touch It! It's Evil!
This kind of things could decrease utility, or make possible uses more difficult?
Well, now all those people wearing t-shirts saying "I'm only wearing black until they invent something darker" will be very happy! Any idea as to when we'll be able to get it in t-shirt form?
...this is a Good Thing for production instruments, but it won't matter much for research/labwork/prototypes; right now I'm working on laser detection of single atmospheric particles; we needed a *black* coating for the inside of the chamber, but it didn't need to be particularly robust, just dark - so we smoked it with a flame. Carbon black is the least reflective substance known, IIRC it absorbs something like 99.996% of incident radiation...anybody who's seen the inside of an old kerosene lamp chimney knows exactly what they mean in the article when they talk about the 'black velvet' appearance. We did have some problems with it 'popcorning' as we pumped the chamber down, but a staged evacuation with good degassing periods took care of that.
Oh, this would make a great solar heating material - somebody mentioned the specific heat of the material, but as long as you have a thin layer backed by a heatsink, the specific heat doesn't matter (it's just the amount of heat a material can contain per gram; if you have just just a tiny bit of black substance, it doesn't matter how much heat it stores); it's all about the absorbtion.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
as a solar heating surface ?"
Ummmmm, much more than black paint?
I don't mean to be snide or anything ( for a change), but you really couldn't figure that out for yourself in about 1/10 of a second?
Not that it'll make much difference in a world that still puts black asphalt products on their roofs (which does everything wrong, being hot in summer and cold in winter) instead of polished aluminum.
In order to make good use of solar radiation one must first learn to use it *properly,* no matter how efficient any particular material is. Otherwise that efficiency just goes to waste.
I recommend a perusal of Rex Robert's classic work "Your Engineered House" for an explaination of how understanding basic thermodynamics can be applied simply and cheaply, with off the the shelf non-propriatary building materials, to a house with remarkable effect.
Just as in software no one makes gobs of money promoting nonpropriatary solutions, even though those solutions may not only be cheaper, but *better.* The whole Open/Propriatary thingummy goes far deeper than the IT industry. It is pervasive in every walk of life.
It's up to you to ignore the advertising material and edumicate yourself I'm afraid.
KFG
Nigel Fox, who heads the optics group at NPL, said: "When you look at the black, it is an incredibly beautiful surface. It's like black velvet."
This could breathe new life into paintings of Elvis, Jesus, and weeping clowns. It could take the art world by storm!
Someone start a line of cybergoth clothing! This could be huge!
"My black is blacker than your black"
And just an hour ago I bought a new pair of black military pants.
Is buying clothes going to be like buying a graphics card from now on, ie two minutes after you buy it the new model comes along to blow it straight out of the water.
Aw crap!
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
a whole slew of new and improved Elvis paintings.
Pictures are mirrored here: dev/null
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Don't use your own shoes..
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
It's the colour of all Lawyers hearts.
Summation 2
came up with the idea of a space-ship coated with a material like this in the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy!
Here is the worlds first picture of this new substance.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
This will prove to be useful, for two reasons:
First, it is a better absorber then what we have now, which, as someone pointed out, would make an incremental improvement for things such as solar collectors.
Second, it may find some powerful uses as a black body emitter, which would have some applications for cooling. Specifically, there is a window in the atmosphere where energy can leave the atmosphere ( around one of the IR ammonia lines, IIRC) this may alleviate the greenhouse effect ... maybe ...
As one of my Professors used to say "Progress is measured by progress in Materials Science". He might have been biased, however...
I would be very interested to find out the wavelengths where this is effective.
There are three types of reflectance that I am aware of: mirrors; diffuse reflectors (lambertian surfaces) and a special case of reflectance as found on a dusty surface, such as the moon( which is an aggragation of spherical lambertian surfaces, with special properties). Anyone else know of any others?
This is progress?
(Not that the return for cost will be there in consumer optics, but that never stopped those of us with $1000 phase coated, nitrogen purged roof prism binoculars before... We're too easy.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I think this "Dark" emmiting material is exactly what is missing to make the famous Dark Succker Theory complete
Pitting the surface with microscopic black holes will make it even blacker.
Besides, it will absorb everything (including matter, not only energy!) very well - good for cleaning industry.
two thing to solve before: how to make microscopic black holes (perhaps in a process of cold fusion?) and how to keep them together (perhaps with dark matter?).
Wait a minute, what is the color of dark matter? Is it black or it's grey a bit?
Less is more !
Sounds perfect for that ufo control panel. Black control panel with the black buttons...
Q. What is Calvin's monster snowman called? A. The Torment Of Existence Weighed Against The Horror of Non Being
On a scale of black this goes up to 11 right?
--My sig is bigger than your sig--
Dark Sucker Theory.. .
Say conventional black paint reflects 1% of the radiation. This stuff reflects, say, 0.1%. If you are building optical instruments then that is a 90% decrease in ambient reflections from internal surfaces, which is really useful.
But if you are interested in harvesting energy then the absorbancy has gone up from 99% to 99.9%, which is an increase of just 0.9% over what we had before. Gee.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
I wonder if they can make it into some kind of paint that's reasonably easy to apply (i.e. without baking, toxic solvents, etc.)? I would love to repaint the inside of my telescope with it. Even if it comes in sheets, it would be great as flocking material. A lot of telescope builders will go nuts over this stuff.
I could have sworn I read about this in the 80's in Omni Magazine.
http://www.bullnet.com
That would make a cool case mod. A really black PC that looks more like a hole with a glowing blue led in the center. With it being so black you cant makeout its actuall shape.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Are they going to call it fuligan?
Think about it, the goths could at last be happy (if that is possible), they can wear uber-black clothing! I know I would want some of it. ;-)
How can you say that civilisation's do not advance... in every war we invent new ways to kill you.
Here is another example.
/syle
offtopic, yes, but somewhat more in the vein of discussion, how does it do on reflecting, say, radar?
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
I reckon positive environmental projects like solar heating for developing countries won't get a look in.
If it really is a useful low-reflecting material, the Official Secrets people will slap a secrecy and Military Secret stylee order on the whole lot and the only time we'll see the stuff (pun intended :-) ) is on UK military equipment. Oh, and US military as well, seeing as Tony is trying his damndest to make us the 51st State these days....
What if this material (with that kind of surface structure) would be made of completely transparent material like pure clean glass/plastic? :-))))
Combined with some kind of color absorbers (if that kind of thing exists at all) it could provide some interesting effects.
Would it be something like chameleon suite? For egg. if someone in this suite stands beetween bushes it should become one with the bushes itself:-> Just a thought, blame me, flame me
Sinisa
It has been comfermed by an unnamed working of the National Physical Laboratory at Disaster Area a universally renown musician has placed an order for a considerable quanty of super-black. Sources close to Disaster Area has so far not been able to lay light on the planned use for this material.
is make a space ship of it and start a really, really loud band!
when i saw the title of this article, some small part of me had hoped they'd finally gotten around to inventing a darker beer.
drat!
The wise follow a damned path, for to know is to be forsaken.
great, as soon as Lars Ulrich gets word of this they'll re-release their black album for more profits.
There\'s no place like ~
The problem with solar power today isnt about efficiency since modern panels have about 70-80% efficiency in heating water. The incoming power is about 1000W per m2. A better absorber wouldnt make the panel that much more efficient.Chromium Oxide have an efficiency of about 92%. Much of the problems lie in how you transport the heat from the panel to the energy storage.Insulation of the panel is something that you have to take into consideration. Cost is also of utter importance since you often have a roof capable of housing more than 30 m2 of panels which in most houses is overkill. To generate water you typically would need about 5 m2 from mars to november.
If this material can make the total cost smaller then its good but if it makes it more expensive it isnt of any use. Robustness and price is what we should look into and not efficiency. A cheap solar panel that lasts for as long as it have to be functional to return the investment is possible today.
The main problem with solar power is that when you need the power most (night/winter) there arent much sun around. Solar Power can never be anything but a valuable complement to something else. All trials of storin the energy longer times have failed miserably so far.
Im not just rambling here, i was a partner in a company manufacturing solar panels some years ago.
HTTP/1.1 400
One of the early applications might be on star-trackers
Was I the only one who read this as star-trekkers the first time?
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
>What were you thinking when you wrote that title??
I am guessing that he meant:
"there is a new material and it darker than any previous material known to man on earth. It could revolutionise optical instruments because it reflects 10 to 20 times less light than the black paint currently used to reduce unwanted reflections"
See since it is darker than any other black material, he said blacker than black because it is blacker than any other material known on earth. And because it is blacker than any known material material on earth he said blacker than black. Because the previously blackest known material was black! Therefore he said blacker than black. Get it?
Forgive me if you were trying to be funny, both sides seem to be overly sensitive.
Oh I can't wait to see the mods on this one.
Blacker than the mood of a web master who just found out that his page was posted on slashdot.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Zaphod Beebelbrox is going to be all over this stuff.
this may alleviate the greenhouse effect ... maybe ...
I'd rather hope not
As my old Professor used to say "its the ENHANCED Greenhouse Effect thats the environmental problem, the normal Greenhouse Effect is what keeps us alive"
If our Atmosphere didn't 'trap' a certain amount of the incident energy from the sun, and the Oceans didn't transport this around the surface then out little planet would resemble a snowball.
This is what happens in an ice age when the Ocean/Atmosphere system flips into another metastable state and the large amount of ice and snow on the surface significantly changes the reflective properites of the planet and the whole system cools.
First we need to understand how this delicate balance actually works before we try and fix it. One thing we are learning is that the Ocean/Atmosphere system is not the safe stable thing we assumed it was, but its very dynamic with a number of metastable states. It can and has switched between states on a geologically quick (5000 years) timescale without much provocation. The bad news is that sustaining life is easy in the current state, it gets much harder in some of the others.
Like a pH buffered solution its quite possible that our environment can tolerate and compensate for all the stuff we chuck into it, and then suddenly flip to another state.
Oh, and the increment improvement in absorbtion will do very little to help solar collectors - the problem with solar collectors is doing something useful with the heat once you've got it, not getting it in the first place. Find me a material thats twice as good as a thermocouple than current technology and we may be on to something...
Back in Blacker than Black
AC/DC should really rename their Back in Black album now.
OK. So this thing is blacker than Dick Cheney's heart, but I have a serious question. First, I know shit little about physics (but plenty about what-not, what? what?). So, can a super black material attract light just by being super black? I mean, if the light is not directly shined upon it, then does a super black material pull "indirect" light toward it? I await your answers/flames/non-sequiturs with baited breath.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
It wouldn't work anyway. Your radiator and headlights reflect sufficient radar to get your speed. The light-absorbing qualities of the paint won't help either, since laser speed detectors use the reflection from your license plate. Covering the license plate with laser-light-absorbing plastic won't help you, either. However, there seems to be no restriction on laser-based jamming, if you want to go that route (pun intended).
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
HCl acting on Zinc plate can produce a very black surface. In about 1980 I experienced the chemical effect and read about it. The article I read had a microscopic view of its surface and it indeed had striking peaks and valleys.
The intent was to use it in cameras in to enhance the already black shrouds fore of the camera lenses in space.
It was very odd looking at something so black.
... than the inside of my wallet.
I believe this was originally developed in a UCLA lab a few years ago. Rumor has it the LAPD was involved in a raid of the facility. When questioned the LAPD spokesperson would only say "it fit the description".
The question is how much more black could it be? The answer is none... none... more black.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
This the stuff Hotblack Desiato's ship is made from in Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Who did what now?
I'm so goth my black is blacker than your black. I call it "black black."
I'm so goth, I don't say "black," I say "blahhwwwkkk."
I'm so goth I have actually seriously uttered the phrase, "the darkest dark of the dark darkness."
;)
My favourite one is a bit off topic but it has to be mentioned..
I'm so goth that bats hang little plastic me's from their ceiling.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Imagine turkeys with white meat, dark meat, and SuperBlack.
Oh wait, I left the oven on for too long.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Why don't they take a picture and put it online so we can see how black it is?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
"As you would expect a100 year old house and to hear all
kinds of footsteps upstairs"
How come in America it only takes a house to be 100 years old to be very likely haunted, and in the UK you don't reach "probably haunted" levels until the house is about 300 or 400 years old?
Do Stateside ghosts get bored of the Ethereal Plane faster and come looking for trouble?
graspee
Super-black
Technoli
I've warned them before about tampering with "dark side matter." This is bad news.
I don't understand what the article means when they say " it reflects 10 to 20 times less light". What does "10 times less" mean? Is this the same as one tenth? Why don't they just say that?
I'm not trolling here. I don't understand it.
The material could also be used in works of art. NPL says several artists have shown an interest.
Does anyone else remember a short horror story about an artist who painted a painting using a "blacker than black" paint, made IIRC from a stone (coal?), who was then absorbed by the painting?
Come on, how are we supposed to know how black it is without some pictures??? Links, please.
;P
-
pronounced "nipple"
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
This must be what the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey was made of.
Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) has produced a proprietary "super black" coating for years now. I've seen it, and it is _very_ non-reflective. The coating mentioned in the article sounds similar.
"Martin Black" is proprietary though, so if you want a part coated you have to send it to Lockheed.
You wrote: black asphalt products on their roofs (which does everything wrong, being hot in summer and cold in winter).
If you're talking about the ability of black asphalt to absorb light and retransmit that as heat, then doesn't it stand to reason black is the best color for your roof during the winter season?
Polished aluminum is a great way to reflect light but a terrible way to insulate.
blog
We're missing the obvious one...
"It's *so* black, light just falls into it."
I recall back in the mid-eighties reading in Omni magazine about a super black material. At the time they called it "fulegan" or maybe "fulgum" (sp?). It also used the principle of light absorbing craters. Though I'm not sure how it stacks up against this newer material.
I am absolutely positive that between ten and twenty years ago I read about this exact mechanism being used to produce a new material that absorbed more light than anything previously known. Are the pits in this new material just better than the old pits, or have I noticed a glitch in the matrix?
.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Hey, some racist modded me as troll. I love Chris Rock and this joke was perfectly appropriate given he is "Blacker than Black" - dumbass mods.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
I don't recall seeing license plates on the B-2, but maybe it was a dealer plane. :)
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Unless you're really obscure and happen to remember the cartoon where the short little inventor invented the portable hole(made in various sizes dripped out of an eyedropper).
You may also know him as the inventor of dry water.
Unfortunately, the prototype portable holes were stolen shortly after invention.
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
You need more than plain RGB to show this, you need to include the little known fourth color, Squant, as well!
Squant description - though you may have to download the plugin to see it properly.
A little planning goes a long way...
If you engineered the pyramids to the right angles and spacing, to a high enough degree of precision, you could have the scattered light interfere perfectly destructively, giving something very close to 100% absorption. It would probably be rather expensive to manufacture in bulk, and have to be kept *very* clean, but for any application where you need something that extreme to begin with, those shouldn't be insurmountable problems.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
To get it even darker, plate a bunch of razor blades with this material, and then stack them.
My father used stacks of razor blades as a heat dump for lasers in his fusion research at University of Wisconsin.
He showed with pencil and paper how the razor blades successively reflect the light into the gaps between the blades, without turning it around. Thus, they absorb all the light, and make a great blackbody.
Just as an interesting note: This was back in the early 70's, at a time when cost-efficient fusion was only a decade away, and had been only a decade away for 20 years. As part of his defense, he was asked whether it would be practical any time soon. His answer was no. When asked why, he pointed out that the reaction that was giving them some success was the D-T reaction, and that Tritium was so rare that it would never be a practical fuel.
That essentially did not earn the pleasure of others in the field, and kept him out of that field -- perhaps a blessing, since success might have doomed his life to failure.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
There's an amusing story by Jack ("Call of the Wild") London entitled "The Shadow and the Flash." It's one of about a dozen stories he wrote that would be categorized as science fiction had the genre existed then.
Two competitive brothers both seek the secret of personal invisibility via divergent, and completely bogus methods. One of them finds some way to make his entire body perfectly transparent (!) in the belief the perfect transparency equals invisibility, and apparently gets his index of refraction close to unity but still has some dispersion, because although he is invisible, he produces telltale rainbow-colored flashes.
The other one searches for a perfect black, in the even stranger belief that an object covered in perfect black reflects no light and is therefore invisible. According to the story, this works except that, of course, he casts a shadow--and when he's present, even when not casting a shadow his presence creates an ill-defined sense of darkness or gloom.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Yet another way to make your computer look way cool! :) Black on the outside, neon lights on the inside..
The problem with solar power today isnt about efficiency since modern panels have about 70-80% efficiency in heating water. The incoming power is about 1000W per m2. A better absorber wouldnt make the panel that much more efficient.Chromium Oxide have an efficiency of about 92%. Much of the problems lie in how you transport the heat from the panel to the energy storage.Insulation of the panel is something that you have to take into consideration. Cost is also of utter importance since you often have a roof capable of housing more than 30 m2 of panels which in most houses is overkill. To generate water you typically would need about 5 m2 from mars to november.
If this material can make the total cost smaller then its good but if it makes it more expensive it isnt of any use. Robustness and price is what we should look into and not efficiency. A cheap solar panel that lasts for as long as it have to be functional to return the investment is possible today.
The main problem with solar power is that when you need the power most (night/winter) there arent much sun around. Solar Power can never be anything but a valuable complement to something else. All trials of storin the energy longer times have failed miserably so far.
Im not just rambling here, i was a partner in a company manufacturing solar panels some years ago.
Linux, because my mother says so!
Google for "telescope buying faq" and search for the FAQs relating to the sci.astro.amateur.
Astrophotography is the sport of masochists. Seriously, if you want to get started in amateur astronomy, don't try to squeeze astrophotography into your first setup unless you have a ton of money to blow. It's expensive and surprisingly difficult.
The first and most important rule of buying a telescope is to NEVER, under any circumstances, buy a telescope from a department store. Never. Never ever. Never ever do that. Never buy a telescope that advertises 400x magnification or some other rediculous value. Also, never buy the telescopes you see advertised on the shopping channel. The guy on their makes complete and utter lies about the capability of the telescopes they sell.
By far, the most important spec on a telescope is aperature. The bigger the aperature, the more light it gathers, and the more you can see. Also, because of the laws of physics, the maximum useful magnification of a telescope is limited by the aperature. Also, for most deep sky objects (nebulae, star clusters, galaxies), you use your lower magnification eyepieces.
The best first telescope is often a pair of binoculars (7x50 or 10x50 are excellent). You'd be shocked what you can see with a pair of binoculars (many, if not the majority of the Messier objects are visible, and the four brightest moons of Jupiter are easily spotted). For an actually telescope, a Dobsonian (a newtownian reflector mounted on a low to the ground, very stable, easy to use azimuth mount) is a easy to use, inexpensive choice. You get the absolute most aperature for your buck (meaning you can see the most things, and see them sharply), and it won't cheat you out of actually learning the sky the way an automated computerized telescope can. I'm a big fan of Orion's XT series (I have an XT8 8" dobsonian myself).
Be sure not to get a telescope that is too big. Yeah, you may have a bunch of cash to blow on a monster scope, but a scope bigger than 8" or so (or even that big) can be a huge pain, and time consuming to set up. If you don't feel like hauling the thing out, you won't use it. On some nights, I end up taking out my binoculars because conditions aren't really good enough to justify the workout.
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
I'm just waiting for the day when they construct a spaceship out of this material... with black dials on black background in the cockpit, illuminated by black lights. And then they gonna set it on remote, and crash it into the sun...
It's just question of how long it takes, and what the ultimate selling price is.
In any case if you build a Rex Roberts type engineered home you couldn't get a mortage in the first place and self contracted with capital you raised yourself, ultimately saving you tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of dollars off the *front* end of home ownership cost.
Bear in mind that a house with a lower retail value also pays lower *property taxes.*
Under the right circumstances owning an "unsalable" home is a positive boon. Perhaps even to the extent that it puts you in a position where you can't be forced to move for work.
KFG
n/t
-- Boycott Shell
I had a 386DX like 8 years and I hated the beige, so I painted it flat-black with some bronze-fleck-- NOW, if I could do it again... I'd paint all my computers this color in a heart-beat.
The only good color for a computer is black, witness the IBM AS/400's and ThinkPads. Think about it, have you *EVER* seen a ThinkPad that wasn't black?
Enough said. :)
"it reflects 10 to 20 times less light than the black paint currently used to reduce unwanted reflections"
The first thing I thought of when I read this was a car bra or car paint. Some background for the confused: laser, while not visible to the human eye, is still light. As such, the color of a material will affect how much laser light will be reflected. The darker a material, the less reflection/the more light absorbed. There are already stealth bras you can find. If this material is better, it will only be a matter of time...
I wonder if the various local gov'ts are going to fight this material for this reason, like how they killed the spray-on, peel-off paint idea a while back. (Robbers would use it to change the description of the car after a crime)
p.s. If you're interested in the quantum physics of light, ala why does it reflect or get absorbed, how do mirages and holograms work, etc., go grab QED by Feynman. Fantastic book. Fantastic author.
Severian the Torturer calls the color of his cloak that is darker than black "fugilin".
My physics professor called the mythical substance with the same electromagnetic absorbtion properties as open space "spacecloth". Physics nerds, is this a common term, or was my prof just using non-standard jargon?
Are you talking about zero-degradation energy storage as light? or light collector based weapons? Or something like that... I think you would need some serious nano-tech to get the precision needed. And for it to be useful- you would have to have something like a perfect 2 way mirror - otherwise you have no guarantee of your input light potential being able to overcome the existing backflow potential... Crazzzeee...
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol
Has science finally managed to synthesize (sp?) Chris Rock?
"You went to film school, dint'ya? I'll bet this really burns you up. Does your father know that you get a [n-word] his coffee?" Yup, that's Super-Black, all right.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
... how long before /. reports that someone has a case mod made of this?
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Because if you look at regular socks, you'll notice that sometimes they're just really really really really really really really dark blue!
Nobody will get the reference, but I'm content chuckling to myself...
Perhaps we could get Procol Harum out of retirement to write a song about it. They did so well with Whiter Paleness...
Think of the advancement this will mean to the Black Velvet Elvis Painting Industry
Actually this "black paint" would probably help for those LIDAR guns the cops are using. Painting front and rear ends of your car along with a good laser detector should help reduce your chances of getting caught spe... um... going just a little bit to fast.
In fact I remember reading an article in "Car and Driver" several years ago that did some testing with LIDAR guns and driving with you headlights on. IIRC driving with your high beams on would reduce the effectiveness of the LIDAR gun by a couple hundred feet. C-n-D even suggested installing high power off road lights with IR filters on them to even further reduce the effective range (giving you some time to slow down before the LIDAR is able to get a reading.)
Of course it seems those damn reflective license plates screw the whole thing up.
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
how much more black could it be?..... the answer is none, none more black......
i have walked down train tracks, walked down train tracks, drunk at 3 a.m. it not magic, it's no great trick, w
You've never had to apply for scientific funding have you?
For some reason I have a compulsion to build a 1 x 4 x 9 monolith and coat it with this stuff.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Like using the micropitting process for monitors? It would sure make my eyes happy if the nonreflective coating was *totally* nonreflective, rather than merely about 1/3rd as reflective as normal glass.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Why that answer is simple: upper middle class, suburban, white kids.
between the greater and lesser infinities sleep the dreams undreamt
That image is copyrighted!
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
So let's paint a spaceship with it, have a very loud rock concert, and crash the ship into the sun.
This is the same stuff used on the Spinaltap album. "How much more black can it be??? The answer is none. None more black"
WWJDFAKB - What would Jesus do for a Klondike Bar?
have the scattered light interfere perfectly destructively, giving something very close to 100% absorption
That can only work on monochromatic light. Different wavelengths need different spacings to interefere like that.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Okay, get a razor without any extra metal on the bottom. Set it flat on the desk, with the blade pointing to the left. [If you want to see one, try looking at the disposable razor blades]. Or by it from the American Razor Company, in Weyer's Cave VA.
Now take another blade, and lay it flat on the first, also with the blade pointing to the left.
Now put another on that. Keep stacking them like that, so that all the blades point to the left and are parallel. Now apply a drop of superglue to the bottom of the stack. Let it dry, and lift the stack up.
On one side, you'll see a lot of razor blades edges. But the thickness of the edge of each razor blade will be extremely small, like 1% of the thickness of a single blade.
---=======IIIIIIIIIII Razor Blade 3
---=======IIIIIIIIIII 2
(blade side) ---=======IIIIIIIIIII 1 (base side)
Between the blades it will be completely black. Don't believe it? Go into a black room, and shine a penlight on it. You won't see the reflection. It absorbs ALL the light. Well, all except for where the very thin edge is.
Now, this might seem to make a great solar panel, but if you touch it, expect ribbons where your fingers were... and rain will damage it, as will dust. But in space it might be okay.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
If you are interested in extracting useful energy then its the total amount absorbed that is important.
Learn to understand the numbers, and you can avoid learning an awful lot that ain't so.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
I don't think he used super glue back then. I'm not sure if they had it. I'd think he used solder, or just a frame to hold them all in place. And either solder or physical contact might be better than superglue, possibly, because it electrically joins the razor blades, which might affect the light absorption characteristics of the heat dump. [some EE can correct me on this, if I'm wrong].
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
That can only work on monochromatic light. Different wavelengths need different spacings to interefere like that.
Is is theoretically possible to make a holographic pattern that would absorb like that at all wavelengths? Or even multiple wavelengths?
TTFN
Okay, first I'd take aluminum plate. I'd evaporate or plate onto its surface a reasonably thick layer of tungsten.
Tungsten, if I remember from articles about electron-tunnelling microscopes, has the property that when you expose it to NaOH [and sorry, I could have details wrong here], it dissolves most quickly where the curvature is smallest. So you can get things down to on the order of 1-atom points.
Now, I'd coat the whole thing with photoresist, and--if necessary, using the principles of holographic diffraction--expose it in a pattern of a whole bunch of lines.
Then I'd run it through NaOH to refine it, and end up with that anechoic chamber. To see my understanding of anechoic chamber, though, search for another MickLinux entry farther down, about razor blade stacks. My understanding *could* be wrong. I claim no expertise here -- though, I must caution you to read my sig anyways. [It's the principle of the thing].
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Actually, to paraphrase Eddie Izzard, "Here you tear your history down, man! I was watching a special on this hotel in Florida, and they said, 'we've restored this to how it looked over fifty years ago!' Surely not! No one was alive then!" Haunted carparks/stripmalls just don't have the same appeal.
49 20 68 61 76 65 20 74 6F 6F 20 6D 75 63 68 20 66 72 65 65 20 74 69 6D 65 2E
I seem to remember Remo Williams and Chiun fighting some guy who could make stuff well-nigh invisible with his blacker-than-black paint.
Anyone else ever read these books? They are a hoot.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
So when can we get keyboards coated with this?
It will make ALL the difference, you know...
...to those t-shirts saying "I'm only wearing black until they find something darker"
This material will make an excellent backround for my new pr0n site.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
I wanted to see how dark it was...
Slash-for-Thought
I used to read Shadow of the Torturer et al every year. It's darker than black, not blacker. Great books, though a bit too xtian to take now.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
It could revolutionise optical instruments because it reflects 10 to 20 times less light
How can you multiply by 10 - 20 and come up with a smaller number? I've never understood this common misconception in grammar/math. It just doesn't make any sence.
My name fits again.
there's a word for the color "blacker than black": fuligin.
Is is theoretically possible to make a holographic pattern that would absorb like that at all wavelengths?
No.
Or even multiple wavelengths?
Yes, but you run into two problems. First it is only 100% effective at the exact wavelength. The effect drops to zero pretty fast for wavelengths that are slightly off. Secondly the surface detail required gets multiplied with each extra frequency. The required level of detail would rapidly shrink below the size of an atom.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
This might bring trenchcoats back in style! :)
I wish nobody had invented the terminology, "x number of times less." I'm pretty sure "20 times less light" means the same as "5 percent as much light," but couldn't they just say that? If it was 40 instead of 20, would we say half as much light or twice as much less light? Jeez.
this must be the material the is used to make the "go anywhere, black instant round door to somewher else" in looney toons.
they were the ones who really got into painting things black.
At last! Something to paint my monolith.
DS Black (Basically "Martin Black" as in Martin Marietta; that is the Hubble Space Telescope) is 35 times blacker than this so-called "blackest black." Forgive the journalist, it's an esoteric subject, but even the more afforadable Epner Technologies EP black is about 20x blacker.
- bl ack.html
I've used EP black for a project, and it is, indeed, much blacker than Krylon Ultra-Flat black, which is itself not too shabby as black coatings go.
http://www.aviantechnologies.com/coatings/av-ds
These, like the dendritic coating in the article, are fragile, and not terribly black at all if you touch them.
-David
A slightly more informative article is here.
They give the recipe.
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
NPL Super Black In order to make accurate measurements in the UV, IR and visible regions, optical instruments and sensors need surfaces with very low reflectance. These black surfaces are used as efficient radiation detectors or may reduce stray light in an instrument. Highly efficient black surfaces allow smaller, lighter instruments to be made, which is an important advantage in aerospace applications. NPL has successfully developed a very high quality optical black ] known as NPL Super Black. The process uses an adapted nickel phosphorus electroless plating technique followed by finely controlled etching and gives probably the blackest surface known in the visible region. NPL has successfully and repeatedly produced the Super Black coating on a small-scale ecottage industryf basis for a number of years. It is now for upgrading and validating the process for plating much larger substrates with this high quality optical black. The upgrade has led to an opportunity to collaborate with CNES, Astrium and Sodern, the major space contractors for the European Space Agency, on the space evaluation of the black. If successful this will open up many new opportunities for supplying coated optics to the aerospace industry.
Is this black the new black? If black is the absence of light and this stuff collects light in it's tiny craters then where does all the light go? Is there an event horizon? But more importantly, is it art?
>But you can flip those numbers around and say we've achieved a 90% decrease
But the solar figure of merit is Watts/$. Has been and will continue to be. How will a micro-tailored coating help- in fact, might it hurt?
The solar breakthrough will probably be in mnufacturing, not materials.
That said, I'm an amateur astronomer, and would snap this stuff up if the price wasn't ridiculous.
>The problem with solar power today
Is cost, cost, cost. Who gives a shine about 99.9999% efficiency if no one will finance the thing? Hell, we can't even get builders to do PASSIVE solar.
>when you need the power most (night/winter)
In theory, yes, but some places need the most electricity during broad, summer daylight. That's when for-profit desktops tend to be on. Air conditioning, of course, is a massive energy hog. Even Chicago, frickin' Chicago, runs enough air conditioners to risk brownouts some summers.
Even if solar is just "a valuable complement to something else," the difference between energy crisis and energy apathy is a few percent. Such is microeconomics. Generating just a few percent of our juice/heat from non-fossil is enough to turn around financial and strategic policies.
Try here: http://www.kleinbottle.com/
Now I can start making those monoliths I've been planning...
does anyone have a website showing this crazy colour? ...
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
I would suspect that you could build some fractally repetitive surface which would still manage to get 99% of the way between where we are now, and actually having 100% absorption.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah, I always wondered about that. What's up with all the "First Post!" comments being all together?