PVC Telescope: A Modular Optics Lab in a Tube!

PVC Telescope: A Modular Optics Lab in a Tube!

Reflector telescopes use mirrors, refractors use lenses. To make a reflector you precision grind a mirror, for a refractor you need to play with at least two lenses-more of you want color correcting and distortion minimizing qualities.

It's quite simple really. Light gets focused between two lenses: the main objective lens at the end of the tube that gets pointed into the sky and the eyepiece. However different colors of light are different wavelengths. Different wavelengths focus at different places. 

This makes your telescope into a prism: colorfully blurry!

When a nice focused green wavelengths falls perfectly on the eyepiece that means the red and blue waves are a little too in front of and too past the eyepiece to be on focus. This problem is called chromatic abberation and some really expensive refractor telescopes have it. It's something that you can: get used to; hate and buy a reflector (mirror) telescope; or pay even more money to correct. Adding additional lenses can bring the red and blue to the same focus point, this is called an achromatic len(s).

Now, to be clear "blurry" isn't exactly accurate as a description of chromatic abberation. The views is very crisp, but tripled slightly: you'd see the moon with a red moon slightly misaligned with a blue moon slightly misaligned with a yellow moon. All very crisp but distracting.

Many telescopes that are refractors (lenses not mirrors) show this tripled misalignment just along the edges of bright objects as color fringes and flares. Even really, really, really expensive refractors can have a little color fringing from chromatic abberation.

If you want to see chromatic abberation on your own just aim a pair of binoculars at an electrical power line hanging from a telephone pole. Of you hey just the line in focus with a bright, clear sky behind it you'll notice yellow and purple highlights along the edges of the line. Shiny highlights on the line may also have weird color aberrations. The better the optics, the less color fringing.

The glass of the lenses absorbs and passes light waves through at different rates. Reflector telescopes (mirror) bounce light off a mirror-the mirror reflects the light, but doesn't absorbs it. The light bounces and isn't passing through it so reflector telescopes don't have problems with chromatic abberation. 

I wanted to build a refractor of my own design that allowed me to swap different lenses in and out to experiment with correcting various flaws including chromatic abberation. A modular optics laboratory in a tube! I decided to use PVC and headrd to Home Depot with calipers, pad, pencil and a tape measure.

But first I needed a nice lens. I bought a cheap one for $7 on Amazon. It was an Ajax Scientific Polished Glass Bi-Convex Spherical Lens, 100mm Diameter 500mm Focal Length. Nice lens!

1x 3" PVC flat top cap (not the domed/rounded bubble top)

3x 3" PVC 3x3 repair couplings (that are smooth inside, not with an internal ridge)

1x 3" PVC 3"x2 foot foam core pipe

1x 4" PVC 4"x2 foot foam core pipe

A big objective lens

Wood saw to shorten both pipes (hack saws don't cut straight with PVC easily)

Telescope eyepiece or bi-convex lens or eyepiece from binoculars

Black spray paint

A big ring cutter drill bit to cut a hole for eyepiece or lens (.965", or 1.25", or 2" or whatever your focuser needs if you're using a focuser instead of just plunking an eyepiece into the hole in the end cap).

At Home Depot I bought a 4" PVC white pipe and painted the inside black to reduce glare and increase contrast. One insert (repair coupling) with hole in the center pushed in followed by this lens followed by another insert. These trap the lens in the tube.

Another insert with hole at other end of pipe allows a 3" PVC pipe to slide in and out to adjust focus. At the end of the 3" pipe pit a 3" end cap with a hole in it to hold an eyepiece of to fit a telescope rack focuser.

Extend the tubes for close focus like neighbor's house, push them in (shorten) for father focus like the sky, moon and stars. All with so much chromatic abberation they looked like a psychodelic Andy Warhol print! My first view was of a street light a couple blocks away. The abberation was so bad it looked like a bunch of multicolored poles barely touching, not merely "misaligned" slightly. 

Medium distance focus is about 20" from lens to eyepiece (focal length is 500mm f/5). So you'll have to cut the tubes to short lengths. This shows the effects of differing focal lengths on telescope designs: magnification (greater or less zoom with the same eyepiece), brightness (f-stop/speed) and field of view (wide angle).

The magnification (zoom-in) of a telescope equals its focal length divided by the focal length of whatever eyepiece you have in it. Every time you double the magnification you loselose 50% of the sharpness of focus and 25% of the brightness! 

If you're looking at something bright like a planet or the moon that's fine-but for faint nebulae and galaxies it might make you unable to even find your target in the sky. 

Useful magnification is twice the diameter of the objective (lens or mirror) in millimeters. 50mm lens x 2 = 100x top magnification.

1000mm focal length ÷ 100x = 10mm eyepiece needed.

Remember though: my design slides in and out so I can change my focal length slightly, but not my objective diameter (unless I swap out the front lens). I can change my magnification by changing eyepieces.

My telescope has a 100mm diameter objective lens. Twice 100mm equals 200x maximum magnification. 

Its 500mm focal length ÷ 200x desired magnification = 2.5mm eyepiece needed. Those are expensive, but I've got a wonderful 3mm eyepiece that gets me close enough. However, in my larger telescope that same eyepiece will give me 400x magnification! Everything effects everything else in the optical chain.

Too close...zoom out or claws out!

Once you've played with focal length and eyepieces you can add a concave lens in between to try and correct for chromatic aberration, etc. Alternatively you can use a double or bi-concave lens instead of an eyepiece. This is really a telescope laboratory in a conveniently simple modular package!

So less than ten bucks for the lens and about thirty-five for the pvc if you don't have it around the house compared to big bucks for a 4" refractor astrograph telescope (plus you'll have to scrounge up a focuser and maybe some other lenses to experiment with correction).

It's quite a large and heavy beast! 

Here it is mounted on top of a rather long, metal, 1970s Tasco. PVC is incredibly heavy, but if you take care and balance it well it moves easily. Even on a terrible mount. Tasco had the worst mounts in the business, but an even bigger tragedy were their eyepieces. They were the small 0.965" size and atrocious! 

I bought an adapter for $9 on Amazon that is a 90° elbow: one end fits into the 0.965" opening in the telescope; the other side has a 1.25" hole that accepts professional 1.25" eyepieces (but not 2" Diameter ones). If you have an old Tasco buy the adapter and some cheap 1.25" eyepieces and you'll be blown away! A 20mm, 12mm and 9mm are a fine set for most Tascos. The mount will still be criminally terrible: jerky, wobbly, prone to falling, etc.

I also took some old slide and film projector lenses and converted them to use as eyepieces. They have varying outside diameters so some had to be spun up on a metal lathe and smallerized, others were too narrow and needed tubing or duct tape wrapped around them for a snug fit.

You can find old lenses like this cheap or free all over the place. Even if you're using a store bought telescope it's neat to increase your eyepiece collection for free and have fun doing it!

At dead center of the photo above you can see the 90° adapter on the Tasco and upper right is the eyepiece simply stuck into the end of my PVC telescope.

Woah, the colors! Chromatic-Cat says meow!

See The Sun Part I

I Want To See The Sun Part I

Much like my other series of posts about seeing atomic particles, this is the first in a sporadic series of posts about using different devices to "see" the sun. From a simple radio telescope to solar viewing filters to a purpose-made solar telescope I'm going to do what you were always warned not to do: stare at the sun! I'll probably throw in some info about my homemade UV and infrared goggles too.

So, what do you need to make a radio telescope? An old satellite TV dish, 8 AA batteries with holder, an rf choke, a satellite finder, and some other odds and ends like solder, tape, a tripod, coax cable and coax terminators. Less than twenty dollars worth of stuff from Radio Shack (and your neighbor's garbage).

Simple instructions from the NRAO (National Radio Astronomy Observatory) are available here: 

http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/epo/teachers/ittybitty/procedure.html

Big caveat: the 0.1Mhz rf come on all the online plans don't seem to exist. Use any smallish RF choke. They may have meant milli or microHenrys (mH) but not Megahertz (Mhz). It's an honest mistake considering Mr Hertz is the guy that discovered radio waves. He used a spark gapped radio antenna, like a bug zapper for radio waves! So many of the things I experiment with are like bug zappers. Alpha particle on my spark detector-zap! Gamma or X-ray on a Geiger tube: zap! On or off electrically. Zap or no zap. 

With this radio telescope we're dealing with something more subtle: quantity. Not just yes or no, but how much? One decibel or two? A flat or peaked curve? Twenty MHz (yes we actually are taking Hertz now) means a solar flare. Ten to forty MHz and you could be looking at Jupiter, but Jupiter's magnetic storms are best monitored between eighteen and twenty-eight MHz. A wide swath between forty and eighty MHz with a plan around sixty MHz? That's Saturn my friend! Two and a half GHz-that's my Hot Pockets in the microwave oven. Of course you add voltage to the mix when interpreting too: frequency, an amplification, amplitude,  voltages, standing wave ratio...all sorts of things used in everyday devices like stereos, phones, cb radios, etc. It's all just electromagnetic waves. 

Setup is to aim at blue sky, dial decibel knob just barely to zero. Point at sun and itll6read around 6. How to aim at sun? Get the shadow of the LMB (pointy part) just barely onto the disk. Trace shadow on dish with marker once needle jumps up:

I ditched the dangerously unbalanced mounting bracket and spun the dish upside-down. There was a hole there that allowed the standard camera mounting screw to fit through, and as luck would have it the nuts from the dish bracket fit the screw. Mounting was easy!

I'm pondering getting a longer coax cable to attenuate the signal and help the RF smooth noise away. It might be possible to coil it on the tripod to create a balun. A balun is just a coil that helps a system cross from a balanced state to an unbalanced on (such as coax cabling).

Update: I did rearrange everything farther from the dish and coiled up a make-shift balun.

The red plastic cup holds the 8 AA battery pack. The second output from the LNB (low noise block converter) is capped off with a gold-plated coax terminator. The LNB is the brains of the dish which is basically a radio received. The actual dish is just a waveguide-badically an receiver in your car, only this received and translates microwaves from satellites instead of AM/FM waves. Simple!

So what am I looking at? Radio waves from our Sun. It turns out that the huge nuclear inferno above our heads melting 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second makes quite a lot of radiowaves! Here's a nice video of me aiming at the Sun and then slightly away a few times.

If I tame all the RF interference (probably by just moving the battery pack away) and plug this into my oscilloscope it should be easy to detect other things: like people walking past the dish or cars driving by. According to the NRAO a cellphone signal is a billion times more powerful than the cosmic rays detected by larger radio telescopes, so a radio-people-detector is very plausible (I've seen it done actually) even though this design is referred to as an Itty Bitty Radio Telescope.

My set up procedure now is to point to clear sky and dial up the gain on the meter until it almost squeals. Then I point out at the sun. If I really crank it up I can tell when the telescope scans past the sun, to the quieter open sky and then much quieter on the neighbor's tall chimney.

With the tripod locked the sun moves out of the dish's narrow focus rather quickly. The moon would do the same as it slides into the path of the sun's light the moon will get brighter in the sky-and on the radio telescope's meter. Think about it, when the moon is dark its surface is -243° Fahrenheit but when the sunlight hits it the surface rapidly heat up to a little over +250° Fahrenheit! Wow! It happens whether we can see the moon or not in the sky, on bright days you could search for the moon in a blue sky. I found it:

I'll revisit this with the oscilloscope data at some point, but lugging this weird device around my neighborhood during the day is embarrassing enough without an additional wheeled cart hauling crazy looking electrical boxes and wires. 

It will give me something more productive to at oscilloscope practice than just trying to write my name with it...cause that's what oscilloscopes are for right? M I K E!

Itty Bitty Radio Telescope? Looks more like an Itty Bitty Kitty Detector to me! I'll just mash my face all over it to be sure. Can it see me? Does it know it's mine now? Meow!

See Atomic Particles With Your Own Eyes Huh, Part 3: Unleashing the fury of the alpha particle spark detector!

So You Wanna See Atomic Particles With Your Own Eyes Huh, Part 3: Unleashing the fury of the alpha particle spark detector!

When working with high voltage make sure to start by lighting a candle to St. Artemy of Verkola!    -Michael Logusz

Unleash the fury!!! My new toy: an alpha particle spark detector with an 8000 volt negatively charged ungrounded plate and extremely thin wires that are grounded. It's like a bug zapper for radioactive particles!

So far I've used: Geiger Counters, nuclear cloud chambers and a spinthariscope/radioscope to detect,  and visually see the paths various radioactive particles (alpha, beta, gamma and x-rays) leave in supercooled alcohol vapor and I've seen the flashes of light their impacts cause when smashing into a thin coating of zinc sulfide.

When an alpha particle passes in-between the wire and the plate of this alpha particle detector it ionizes the air in between: ZAP! The disk I'm holding with tweezers is 0.7 microcuries of the radioisotope Americium-241.

Every ZAP causes an avalanche: electrons start smashing there way into the electromagnetic field while ionizing the air gap between the plate and wire creating a plasma. The dielectric breakdown strength is exceeded by the electrical field's power. This rips a conductive path in the air. It's what causes lightening bolts to get all spikey, inside a sealed Geiger Counter tube is called the gas multiplication effect, but the result is the same: ZAP!

I bought this simple, but amazing device from Scientifics Direct. The first arrived with a blown out power supply. They rushed me out a replacement that works fantastically as you can tell from the videos.

In the diagram above to the upper right is an idea: layer many of these in a stack and that would give you the speed and direction of the particle!

My visceral "need to see" is met with these devices, unlike understanding through theory via mathematical formulae-which can have its own, equally powerful eureka moments. I still remember seeing Saturn for the first time at 2:22am with my telescope set up in the middle of a freezing Michigan road. Simple seeing: nowadays astronomers use telescopes that measure rather than simply look and see. In contrast, my activities are utterly primitive, but they're really fun!

This video shows a larger 0.9 microcurie source that is better insulated with protective plating: it will degrade slower, but has slightly fewer particles zinging off of it. Still plenty of fun! And all it took was 8000 volts of electricity that was negative (below the voltage of the ground point, in this case the wires).

High Voltage / Highly Weird

High voltage electricity (even without ionizing radiation) is fascinating. So are the electromagnetic fields that high voltages create. Many household devices feature transformers.

A transformer is basically two diffetent coils of wire that don't touch. The first coil gets powered by the electricity from the wall outlet plug. The electricity flowing through the coil creates an electromagnetic field. This field radiates outward and creates electricity in the nearby (but not touching) secondary coil.

Weird! But it gets weirder: if the second coil has more loops of wire it will receive/create more electricity than was pumped into the first coil from the wall outlet! That's a step up transformer. Less coils mean lower power is magically captured: a step-down transformer.

If both coils have the same amount of loops, the same amount of electricity jumps to the second coil as was pumped into the first coil. This of called an isolating transformer: all it does is isolated the wall outlet power from the device since at no time do the coils ever physically touch! Since all transformers isolated, only the ones that don't step up or down are called isolating transformers.

Here's a transformer I just got that will step up 120 volt wall outlet electricity to 7,500 volts. At the bottom left is a tiny first (primary) coil. It is not attached in any way to the rest of the transformer. The field of creates bleeds over onto the huge coil to the right: stepping up the voltage.

I was given this transformer for free yesterday, along with a bunch of other high voltage toys. I would have made an alpha spark detector with it, but since I already have one maybe this will end up as a Tesla Coil or Jacob's Ladder or who knows what.

Whatever I make will probably be a visceral seeing device, as opposed to a subtle sensing one. First I look, then I go back and visit the theory. My first love is seeing but I always (eventually) get to the theory.

Forget seeing particles, I'm working on a new string theory: I think this string might taste good! Meow.

The Power of Cold (and Hot)

The Power of Cold (and Hot)

What we have here is video of my new Stirling Engine. As shown it is sitting on top of a hot glass of water. This heats the bottom plate. Room temperature air (and sometimes an ice cube) cool the top. This creates a temperature differential which starts the engine spinning.

This is not a steam engine! Hot air expands and pushed the piston to the cold side. The hot air leaks past the piston to the cold side too which makes the gas contract, pulling the piston back down. It's a sealed system so the now cold air heats again and the piston goes up and down over and over again. It's seems very simple, yet probably is the most complex thing I've had on my blog! 

So, if you supply heat and cold to the top and bottom it outputs power/work. With hot water out of a coffee maker this particular engine ran ran for over an hour at about 200 rpm. After it started slowing down I added an ice cube to the top plate and it sped back up for another half hour or so.


But, of you supply power/work with an electric motor it outputs cold/heat. Tiny versions of this are actually used to cool microchips in imaging and night vision systems. Although a similar invention called the Peltier Cooler is rapidly replacing it. Peltier Coolers are solid state devices with heat sinks that transfer heat from one side to the other using electricity (power/work).

Another use for these subtle, quite, simple engines is in submarines. My other blog is the devoted to my model submarines. I love subs! 

(http://mikelogusz.blogspot.com) 

Anyway,  stealth and air are a concern for submarines. Recently Saab (under the name Kockums Naval) debuted a Stirling Engine for sub propulsion: quite and no need for air/diesel/nuclear replenishment. Russia's attack on nearby Ukraine had seen more focus on the Swedish manufacturer's efforts on the realm of quieter than stealth subs powered by these AIP (air independent propulsion) systems. No more surfacing to get air for the electric and diesel systems of old: the 1816 brain child of the Reverend Stirling has come of age big time. With the renewal of Cold War antagonisms we'll see cutting edge efforts to incorporate this old technology anew.

Segway inventor Dan Kaman is researching then for augmenting our power grid, solar power companies are researching them for the same reasons. Kaman has come up with a Stirling Engine called the Beacon 10 which can generate electricity (power/work) from natural gas for a home or can be used in the reverse to heat water (for a laundromat for example).

You'll notice a clacking noise in my Stirling Engine: it has metal on metal connecting points with no bearings. A little bit of graphite powder lubricant or a simple set of roller bearings would make this thing almost completely silent. There is a little slop in the system that can be taken out by tightening the length of the piston arms. That alone would probably diminish the slight noise by about 90%.

Stealth beyond stealth.

A hot mess on the bottom pushes your eye up to the cool cat on top, then back down again. Thank goodness for moody lighting and PhotoShop! Meow.

Flexagon, Folding Paper Machines

Flexagon, Folding Paper Machines

This is my flexagon. It is a tetra-tetra flexagon. Or has four faces and four sides. By folding, and sometimes pinching and flexing, these little paper devices you can check change numbers or colors or patterns. Numbers or colors or patterns well up from seemingly flat dimensions in an (almost) never ending succession like a mobius-strip come alive! Although instead of creating a 3D shape from a flat piece of paper and then making it 1D this mobius-strip "snake", the flexagon takes a flat piece of paper and cycles of into the realm of 3D momentarily and then end with a 1D/2D changed first world.

Each flex, pinch, fold or flip can change the image, pattern or number by a little or a lot. Flip, meow, flip!


In 1939 Arthur Stone, Bryant Tuckerman, Richard Feynman and John Tukey published a paper of their mathematical findings after Arthur Stone discovered the hexa-flexagon. Flexagons can have as few as three sides up to an infinite number: whatever your brain can come up with, provided you have a big enough  piece of paper.

Here is my humble collection of flexagons. There are various shapes, which necessitate different maneuvers-not just flipping like the first video.

Pinch, flex, pinch, flex...

This last hexa-hexa-flexagon has six sides and six faces, so many in fact that I stopped flexing it at just the 5th face/side...I just got lost between dimensions and couldn't find the sixth.

I'm stuck in dimensions too-meow!

Jacob's Ladder Toy

Something very similar to a paper flexagon is this Jacob's Ladder Toy I made from some La Florentine candy boxes that my boss gave me.

There are tons of great instructions online on how to make these. My two tips: don't make the ribbon attachments too tight; and use heavy boxes. I ate the candy, so my boxes are too light and don't flip as fast as they could.

Although it's "automatic" and quite impressive looking in action, the Jacob's Ladder Toy is much less sophisticated than a flexagon. Add we've seen previously, a flexagon can have many phases it can cycle through. My Jacob's Ladder Toy can only flip the boxes upside down or right-side-up.

I'll probably throw some pennies into the boxes to weight them better.

see atomic particles with your own eyes huh? Part II

So you wanna see atomic particles with your own eyes huh? Part II

Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten.

(What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.)

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein was a fascinating weirdo, but in the second proposition to his only (seventy-five page long) contribution to the world of philosophy and logic (the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus) he wrote the quote above. He wasn't denying art, religion, myth, but when speaking of absolute truth there are facts (atomic and otherwise) and then there is everything else.  Stay in there, it gets less boring real soon...

Basically he went against metaphysics (sort of) and Plato, et al and piled on a bunch of stuff about words and the world and truth functions (like actual math functions but with words) and examining the world using language. If any of the above grabs you: search "atomic sentence" and there's a whole world of true/false wordy-math formula semantic whatever. Anyway, Wittgenstein argued for unalterable objects/forms in direct opposition to eastern philosophy where Forms are ever changing, relative substances in a constant state of flux (sounds just like radioactive elements becoming different substances by adding/losing electrons and particles through decay. Think back to the last post about changing the dime's silver "form" to different isotopes 107, 108, 109 and 110. Flux. Change. Pretty much the opposite of Wittgenstein's ideas, but my quest to see atoms isn't.

Anyway, Wittgenstein claimed he solved all the problems of philosophy(!) so there's no need to continue in that vein. Here's an Atomic Facts of my own: I've seen the trails left by alpha, beta and gamma particles with my cloud chamber. This was covered in one of my previous posts. Think of the nuclear cloud chamber like standing in fog and watching bullets zing past you ripping lines through the fog. Cool-but I want more!

This is where my new toy comes in: a radioscope / sphinthariscope. A radioscope is a screen with zinc-sulfide paste smeared on it. It also has a magnifying eyepiece attached. You hold it up to alpha emitting radioactive objects to see tiny flashes of light when the alpha particles hit the zinc-sulphide crystal and form a phosphor (not to be confused with the chemical element phosphorus). It glows in the dark, well actually it scintillates. 

The word sphinthariscope comes from the Greek word for scintillate or sparkle. A sphinthariscope comes with a built in piece of radioactive material to "power" it-a radioscope is the same thing but with the radioactive material removed, along with the bottom of the device so that you can plop it on top of your own radioactive materials.

For $29 you can buy one from United Nuclear-but for about $9 you buy the activate zinc-sulfide and smear it on your own homemade scope. I opted to order one first, I'll probably make one from scratch for the fun of it in the future.

William Cooke made/discovered the first spinthariscope when using a phosphor screen to look for bits of radioactive material he spilled on the floor (been there-done that). He was lighting the screen with an even about of materials, but crawling around on the floor let him see tiny amounts of (alpha) radiation as individual flashes-not just an even glow. 

They became popular novelties in the early 1900s to 1950s: nice brass ones that people took to fancy dinner parties were the "in" thing. The famous Lone Ranger Atomic Ring was a later one that tons of kids received after making their Kix Cereal boxtops in. Then the fad waned.

So how did my radioscope work?

At first there was nothing, but after about ten minutes in a dark room I could see the alpha sparks. My eyes took time to adjust, but the zinc-sulfide coating glows in the dark for a few minutes as well.  At 6400 ISO with a fast f/1.8 lens I couldn't photograph them. Digital camera: 1, human eyeball: 1.

My uranium ore had random green flashes like looking out at a vast field and watching for fireflies to flash. There were some sideways "zingers" and bigger, smeared flashes like lightening behind clouds.

As "hot" as my uranium is to my Geiger counter (which measures beta, gamma and x-ray) there wasn't too much alpha going on. It was nice and subtle and I could have watched for hours, but I didn't like having uranium two inches from my face blasting intense radiation into my eyeball like some brain cancer inducing Medusa.

I moved my radioscope off the pile of uranium and plopped it on top of my little piece of Americium radioisotope 241 (AM-241). AM-241 spews out lots of alpha and a fair amount of gamma radiation. It's what ionizes the chamber inside many cheap smoke detectors: smoke particles block the alpha particles (they're weak) and trigger the alarm.

The verdict with Americium? Wow!! At first it was a dense, waving matrix of corruscating green dots like an old computer monitor from the 1980s that was being reflected in a wavy lake at night. Green dots pulsating, then the dots would surge and swirl like a Hindu mandala (which metaphysically symbolize the universe-Wittgenstein would not approve). 

Imagine the pattern on m my kilim rug, if the rug was hanging on a clothes line and the wind was blowing it toward and away from you in billowing ripples. Mesmerizing!

Sometimes it looked as though the dots were fruit flies or tiny gnats swarming (if gnats glowed in the dark). 

So, while the cloud chamber I built was like having bullets cut trails through fog, this radioscope is kinda like driving a fast car with your headlights off through a pitch black field and having fireflies splattering on the windshield...plus swirling and pulsing like a car wash on that windshield. I have lots of experience with glowing insects on my vehicle (still no idea what the one I took a photo of above was).

The surging and receding coruscating waves appear to be just like the magnetic ferri fluid (iron particles in liquid showing the magnetic field). The lapping waves of radiating particles being emitted in all directions (but viewed as they hit the flat bottom of the radioscope). 

In this flower photo the red tips are like the green alpha dots. By their speed, number and brightness you can infer many things (like the yellow paths). The charge of alpha particles was first investigated with a sphinthariscope, and research on the charge of electrons was furthered by its use; along with the correct form of atoms and their nucleus.

Imagine instead of black magnetic fluid outlining a magnetic field, green dots outlining a field radiation-smashed against the flat viewing window of my radioscope.

With these two easy to make/cheap to buy devices I've seen the paths of radioactive particles and partially how the radiate.

I think I can see the particles too! Meow.