Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Argon ice

Argon ice

A small chunk of rapidly melting argon ice (liquid argon flowing off). The method of ice production can be found on the image page.

Reason

This image shows an extremely rare phenomenon, that of a noble gas in a state other than gas. I am aware of no other images of liquid or solid noble gasses anywhere else on the web, let alone free images. This image is kind of a test, in that it has pretty bad qualities to it like purple fringing and overexposure. However, I think it may have a chance at passing because it is so unique. This image, the best of a lot that I took, was EXTREMELY difficult to capture, I had a total of no more than 5 seconds from the time the ice was removed from its cryogenic liquid nitrogen bath to get the shot before it completely melted and vaporized. I think this is probably nearly the best result one can hope for when imaging such an exotic phenomenon. If anyone wants to take a crack at fixing its faults in photoshop I'd be more than thankful. (I feel I should also note that while the ice may look a bit blurred, this is the maximum sharpness achievable due to the fact that the whole thing is (unavoidably) continuously cloaked in the haze of condensing droplets of air and water vapor.) --Deglr6328 05:45, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Articles this image appears in

phase transition, argon

Creator

User:Deglr6328

• Support as nominator — Deglr6328 05:38, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose As you said, it has some pretty huge technical problems, and cannot be fixed as lost information cannot be recovered. Other than that, there are also other faults such as unable to show how does it look different from say a normal block of ice (IOR difference for example). Is the whole thing ice or is it contained in some sort of glass tube? Also a 5 second window is considered quite generous as you can prepare it before hand, setting the correct exposure etc. manually (so you won't get the awful over-exposure), many sports photographs have time windows of far less than that. It's a good picture illustrating it, but not FP material. --antilived^{T | C | G} 06:10, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Yeah but you only have to concentrate on taking the picture with that scenario. Here, you have to hold the ice as its disappearing, the airflow has to be positioned just right so the ice isn't occluded by mist and you have to be careful not to burn your fingertips on the super-cold tweezers! I never figured out how to avoid that last bit. :) Everything you see here is agon ice, it has been taken out of the glass cylinder. --Deglr6328 22:07, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
• Question What's the purpose of keeping this in color? ~ trialsanderrors 06:34, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
• Support. Well, it is beautiful, no question: I love the harsh glare off the reflective surfaces. What kind of background is it though? It doesn't look like the inside of a lab or anything! --Vaelta 08:13, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Thanks! The background is just a piece of black felt.--Deglr6328 22:07, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
• Comment Can you go into more detail on how you created Argon ice? The current process is that the Argon was "frozen by allowing a slow stream of the gas to flow into a small graduated cylinder which was immersed into a cup of liquid nitrogen". That's a little vague. Not that I don't trust you or anything, but it'll help if you elaborated a bit more. =) Jumping cheese ^Cont@ct 08:42, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
  • How did you avoid getting water condensation in the cylinder? Was the argon gas stream applied before immersing the cylinder into the liquid nitrogen? --Dschwen 09:53, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Sure, you can find more images of the graduated cylinder on the wikimedia page for argon [1]. So, I took the small graduated cylinder and put a thin plastic tube which was connected to the tank of argon, just inside the lip of the cylinder. Then I turned the gas on to release a slow stream of argon into the graduated cylinder, I let it purge with argon like this for a minute or so. Then I lowered the closed end (bottom) of the cylinder into a cup of liquid nitrogen (taking care not to let either the liquid or the vaporizing nitrogen to rise above the open end of the cylinder with the argon gas tube still in it. Then I just let the argon condense to a liquid on the cold inner walls of the cylinder. After a while the collected liquid began to freeze at the wall and move inward (you can see the resulting hollow cup like shape of the ice chunk. There is no risk of condensing out nitrogen or oxygen (or water) from the atmosphere because the cylinder is being continuosly purged with argon throughout the process. When I was satisfied that I had collected a sufficient amount of argon ice in the cylinder I quickly pulled out the gas supply tube and capped the cylinder (LIGHTLY!) with a piece of plastic. After this point you have to really work quick to set up the camera, precool the tweezers in the liquid nitrogen and finally image the argon ice after you take it out of the cylinder. After you take the ice out of the cylinder it WILL start condensing water out of the air but the thing melts so incredibly rapidly that it doesn't have time to accumulate anywhere because the surface of the ice is continually sloughing off so fast. water only condensed on the ouside of the cylinder a little bit above the liquid nitrogen level it was immersed in and none condensed inside. Curiously, the argon ice was absolutely clear, there were no individual crystals that I could see at all and I wonder if it was indeed a single crystal. --Deglr6328 22:07, 1 May 2007 (UTC)